1 Demythologizing Demonologies

Snakeheads and Piranhas Rabid in the Amazon

This wasn’t a typical fishing trip. Usually I research a fish, target a fish, seek out its authorities, make elaborate travel plans, then finagle support from my university if I can. But in this case, all I had was a larval idea. Given the huge amount of recent TV shows featuring “monster fish,” such subject matter was obviously of interest to a mass audience, so therefore marketable. More importantly, this was stuff I’d been studying for over forty years—from catching big, old ugly lunkers to researching aspects of wildness in art history and literature to speaking on behalf of demonized grotesques. So I wasn’t just thinking about investigating the eco-issues of some of the world’s most terrifying fish, I was prepared to hop on that bandwagon and write my own monster-fish book.

Little did I know that as I started that first chapter, I was also starting a new chapter in a new life—in a place I’d never dreamed of going: the Amazon. Being the hugest river system in the world, four thousand miles long and over 150 miles across at the delta, the entire drainage basin covers 40 percent of South America. With more than 2,200 species of fish, the Amazon and its veins contain the vastest spectrum of fish on the planet.

But the thing was, I hadn’t lit off to the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve on the equator to fish at all. The real reason I had gone was for both the most profound and dumbest of reasons that have ever existed: I was in love.

It wasn’t even part of my plan to take my work to Ecuador. I’d flown to the Andes to be with her, and I’d put my workaholic ways on hold. Being a globe-trotting adventurous type, she’d taken me on an overnight bus ride followed by some roller-coaster taxi madness to a launch point on an artery of the Amazon where we were greeted by a photo on a restaurant wall of one of the most massive and impressive monster fish I had ever seen in my life. It was a twelve-foot-long arapaima caught by extreme angler Jakub Vágner, hauled from the very tributary we were setting out on.

Our guide from a local tribe, Wilson, picked us up, and we took off in a motorized canoe to our lodge amidst the anacondas. Somewhere in that river, there were three-hundred-pound piraiba catfish, and we saw all sorts of monkeys and sloths and parrots in the trees.

On the first of our four nights as the only gringos in our isolated neck of the woods, Wilson led us on a midnight hike with his trusty machete in hand. He was pointing out tarantulas and bizarre bugs and explaining strange animal calls. It was pitch black except for our flashlight beams as we wound through the rattle of bamboo rats and caimans blurping in the night. Then we came to a ferny marsh full of crazy orchids and hidden snakes.

The three of us were wearing rubber boots as Wilson led us further in, shining his light into the water. He then handed his machete to Lea, and I saw a sight so badass that it seared its image into every molecule of my being. The most gorgeous, fun-loving poetry professor that I had ever met in my life was raising a two-foot blade above her head, then bringing it down with a sudden swipe, right across the spine of a tilapia-looking fish lit up in the flashlight beam.

She, of course, had never done this before, and that fish, of course, had never been guillotined across its back. That machete, however, hit a log and stopped short, and the fish shot off, zigging and zagging to a palm frond floating in ankle-deep water. When I pulled back the leafy cover, it was nowhere to be seen.

Wilson had already bagged several of these fish in a plastic sack to convert into breakfast the next morning. He called them dormelinas, meaning “sleepy fish.”

Anyway, we kept mucking on, until we came to another fish. It was long and skinny and covered with cheetah spots and treading in place. Wilson called it “Juan chi chi,” which in Mexican Spanish translates to “Johnny tits.” But in Ecuadorian Spanish, the meaning is more ambiguous. He handed the machete to me.

So I slashed Juan across the back. The blade went straight through its entire body and into the mud between my feet. A khaki-colored plume immediately clouded the water, and we waited for it to clear. It took a minute, and then I saw the silvery flash of its rolling back half. I scooped it up with my bare hand, and there was something familiar about its streamlined contours, especially its eely dorsal fin rippling from the shock of being severed completely in half.

Then I saw the front half spiraling on the edge of the cloud, so I grabbed it. Predictably, it chomped me a good one. And, I would add, with the speed and intensity of a viper hell-bent on getting in one last lunge—a feat it accomplished with bloody success.

Nevertheless, I pulled it from the swamp. In my hand, two fingers sliced open in three separate spots, I held the notorious snakehead, its fangs still snapping for more human flesh.

When snakeheads got loose in the United States right after 9/11, people freaked out. This happened on the heels of the anthrax attacks, when the country was as paranoid as a country could be. When a snakehead was found in a Maryland pond, the media rushed to that spot and continued to scream that the sky was falling—a sky full of man-eating apex predators waiting to devastate an entire continental ecosystem!

But it wasn’t just Maryland where snakeheads were on the lam. They’d gotten loose in California, Florida, and Massachusetts. From 2002 to 2008, they were also found in North Carolina, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. They even escaped from a fish farm in Lonoke, Arkansas, which is why I joined an extermination effort in 2009 that somehow escaped the radar of international news as the largest “fish purge” in world history. As in most previous eradication efforts, every living creature in every system where snakeheads were suspected of being was wiped out in order to eliminate a creature that apparently threatens citizens of this nation on the same level as radical Islamic jihad.

I went out with biology students from the University of Central Arkansas, and we used the chemical known as rotenone to deplete ditches of oxygen. Rotenone had already been used to treat forty-nine thousand watershed acres covering more than 440 miles of streams in the state. This highly coordinated effort involved agents from multiple wildlife agencies, ATVs, helicopters, and over a million dollars earmarked specifically for snakehead annihilation. But ultimately, only 150 snakeheads were eradicated from a much larger number still swimming around out there—a fact which has pretty much vanished from our consciousness like the antidote we purpled the waters with after wasting every tadpole, minnow, and water snake that just happened to be a casualty in that obsessive war.

As we’re finding out, snakeheads aren’t the boogeymen we’ve made them out to be. They’re even proving to be a valuable sport fish right in the heart of the U.S. capital. As Andrew Zimmern showcased on a 2013 episode of Bizarre Foods filmed in Washington DC, these fish are now prey to bowhunters, and there’s a place for snakeheads on American dinner tables.1 And as we’ve seen in Arkansas and other places invaded by these nonnative species, this is no plague of biblical proportions. It’s a bummer, of course, to have to deal with invasives, but keeping our fears in check is also advisable.

In the Ecuadorian Amazon snakeheads are just as much a presence as the parasitic candiru catfish, which are way scarier. These translucent little buggers, also known as “vampire fish,” aren’t much thicker than a toothpick, and they have a reputation for entering human genitals and digging in with barb-like fins to bloat themselves with blood. But for as long as our dread of this fish has been around, along with the knowledge that it can cause death or lead to castration, only one known case has ever been documented, and that wasn’t until 1997.

The candiru cat has cousins that look like overgrown macaroni noodles that are equally as dangerous. These maggoty-looking fish are known for boring in and drilling through their hosts, Swiss-cheesing them to death. Just watch the 2014 “Amazon Apocalypse” episode of River Monsters to see how Jeremy Wade concludes that candirus & co., in collusion with piraiba and redtail catfish with a side of piranhas, devoured an overturned boatload of humans.2

But according to the website Rainforest Expedition, which echoes many other sources, the hype that surrounds the candiru is overblown. As the author states, “extensive research has indicated that much of this legend is probably a myth since Candirus detect the gills of fish by sight more than scent and the physics of fluid dynamics makes it impossible for them to swim up a stream of urine.”3

But back to snakeheads: as it turns out, there is hardly any scientific literature on the role this fish plays in its natural ecosystems. Basically, the information we have is fear oriented, so if you can find anything on this species getting along with other species, which has been happening for more than 50 million years, then you’re lucky. Almost every single Google search reveals that the brunt of what we know of this fish (which is also indigenous to Asia and Africa) decries them as aggressive, malevolent, air-breathing creatures that slither on land and attack humans. For the most part, this info comes straight from U.S. state agencies that want nothing to do with this fish, not foreign fisheries which don’t see snakeheads as a problem.

Hence, data on wild snakehead populations coexisting with other species is virtually nonexistent. Still, there are a handful of articles by journalists who debunk the bloodthirsty reputation of this species, which made its pop culture debut in 2004 via the Lou Diamond Phillips horror movie Frankenfish, about mutant snakeheads in Louisiana devouring swimmers and fishermen.4

But according to an article published in New Scientist, snakeheads are oversensationalized tropical fish that cannot survive northern winters. Their hypothetical range of destruction is therefore limited. Editor Michael Le Page notes that a spokesperson for the Environment Agency in the United Kingdom claims that snakeheads are no more dangerous than pike. Le Page also asserts his disbelief of reports that accuse this fish of attacking humans.5

A Reuters article in the Huffington Post agrees with this observation, insisting that snakeheads “have gotten a bad rap.” Fisheries biologist John Odenkirk is quoted as stating “intelligent management—not eradication” is the objective of the state of Virginia, where snakeheads “have not wreaked havoc with the Potomac River ecosystem.”6 Odenkirk’s findings support those of Le Page, who concludes that “claims that it wipes out all other fish are just not true.”7

We saw our first piranha two days later. Wilson took us into a backwater, rigged us up with some fresh-cut cane poles with six feet of heavy-duty monofilament then attached some homemade leaders fashioned from what looked like baling wire. He parked the canoe in the confluence of two streams and instructed us on what to do.

We baited up with chunks of beef that had been marinating in blood then thrashed our rod tips in the water, simulating an animal in distress. This is what attracts piranhas, which typically swim in schools of thirty to forty fish.

Within minutes Wilson pulled a bright orange, metallic-looking piranha into the boat. It glistened in the setting sun, dangling from his line. The upturned underjaw had highly visible triangular teeth, which is why piranha means “toothy fish” in the Tupi Indian language. And to show us what those pearly whites could do, Wilson gripped the fish in one hand, inserted a pencil-sized stick into its mouth with the other, and the piranha snapped it in half like an uncooked spaghetti noodle.

After a humid night filled with the revving roar of howler monkeys sounding like a stock car race, we found ourselves in the motorized canoe towing a primitive dugout up the Rio Cuyabeno. We went about two miles and entered a bayou in the smaller craft. With Wilson in the stern, Lea in the middle, and me up front, the three of us headed upstream, searching for manatees.

It was a hard paddle because the dugout weighed a couple hundred pounds, and the farther we traveled, the harder the current flowed. We were at the tail end of the rainy season, the water was up, and the flow was strong.

We went through a few lagoons, venturing deeper into territory that hadn’t been traveled for months. Wilson kept breaking out his machete to chop branches blocking our path. And as the vegetation closed in, brushing our shoulders and heads, more and more bugs tumbled into the boat.

At one point something stung me, so I scooped some mud from the shallows and applied a poultice. This method had proved effective for Lea when something bit her the day before. I had chewed up a walnut and applied it to her bite, and it sucked the venom out. Whether the culprit be a biting fly or some sort of wasp, I’ve found that starchy substances like bread or chips can absorb toxins if you can get a moist mash on in time.

We were also constantly bailing with a radiator coolant jug because the dugout had a minor leak. Just an inch of water on the bottom of the boat added another hundred pounds, which could be felt in every stroke.

We traveled five miles, Wilson constantly hacking away. Sometimes we’d come to a fallen tree, then maneuver the boat under it and crawl over the branches. Other times, Wilson would chop straight through a one-foot-diameter log. His machete proved to be much more efficient than an axe or saw, and we eventually made it to a spot where he cut some more cane and assembled our poles.

Tied to a tree, suspended in a deep spot where the current had some pull, we baited our lines and thrashed our rods in the water. Minutes later, we felt them on the other end. It was a lot like fishing for sunnies, but getting piranhas to connect was tougher. When teeth like those start tearing on a piece of meat, it doesn’t take long for the bait to get shredded off the hook. Plus, I’m sure they could sense the metal, and there’s a certain art to setting the hook. But if you set the hook with too much enthusiasm, you risk launching a piranha out of the water and into the boat. When that happens, it will snap away maniacally because that’s its main defense. And if a piranha is off the hook and in your boat, then you better watch out for any exposed toes, especially if there’s water in the hull for it to shoot around in.

I caught the first one. It was a white piranha about ten inches long and silvery with sparkles. It had swallowed the hook, so I passed it back to Wilson, who got it out. After that, he gutted it and used the organs as chum. We watched the swim bladder floating downstream. Within minutes the cannibals arose, devouring it and making the surface boil—but nothing like in the movies.

Since the little guys kept jacking our bait, we moved on to another spot, fishing in the blazing sun. Lea and I were dripping with insect repellent, sunblock, and sweat, but Wilson seemed as dry as the ludicrous, luminous, ornate blooms flowering vibrantly from the lush.

Meanwhile, Lea was becoming increasingly incensed at the punks that kept swiping her bait. The more her curses increased, the more I saw how she was taking this challenge seriously. Her invectives were aimed directly at the fish, who she addressed with colorful language, which never failed to crack me up.

By midafternoon I caught another, but this one was just a little sucker, not more than six inches. I threw it back, and then Wilson caught another.

The sun was now high in the sky, and since we were burnt out on fishing, we ate some pastries Wilson brought along. They were ball-shaped pancakes with chunks of bananas stashed inside. Wilson called them “hidden love” (that’s the translation), and then we had a plantain or two.

Sitting there eating lunch, I began to wonder what would happen if any of us fell in. I’d learned from fishing shows that piranhas rarely attack humans, but on the other hand, I’d seen what the thrashing of our cane poles could do, and I’d seen how they had swarmed the swim bladder. This was definitely something I needed to look into.

The first nasty rumors about piranhas going postal were actually popularized by a populist American President. In his memoir Through the Brazilian Wilderness, Theodore Roosevelt described the species as a “cannibal fish . . . that eats men when it can get the chance.” Roosevelt clearly relished expressing his biased opinion and went to great lengths to pigeonhole this fish as dangerous and aggressive. As he went on to explain:

They are the most ferocious fish in the world. Even the most formidable fish, the sharks or the barracudas, usually attack things smaller than themselves. But the piranhas habitually attack things much larger than themselves. They will snap a finger off a hand incautiously trailed in the water; they mutilate swimmers . . . they will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast; for blood in the water excites them to madness. They will tear wounded wild fowl to pieces; and bite off the tails of big fish. . . . Most predatory fish are long and slim, like the alligator-gar and pickerel. But the piranha is a short, deep-bodied fish, with a blunt face and a heavily undershot or projecting lower jaw which gapes widely. The razor-edged teeth are wedge-shaped like a shark’s, and the jaw muscles possess great power. The rabid, furious snaps drive the teeth through flesh and bone. The head with its short muzzle, staring malignant eyes, and gaping, cruelly armed jaws, is the embodiment of evil ferocity.8

Roosevelt continues his narrative, describing multiple “exhibition[s] of such impotent, savage fury” by these “pests of the waters.” He then follows this with stories of folks being dismembered if not devoured. There’s even a tale about a guy getting his tongue bit off, and another of a dead man discovered in a fjord, “his clothes uninjured but every particle of flesh stripped from his bones.” Piranhas are then described as “a veritable scourge in the waters they frequent,” “blood-crazy fish,” and “ferocious little monsters.”9 It should be noted, however, that the brunt of support for these arguments comes from second- or third-hand stories that Roosevelt didn’t even witness—which is how fish stories happen.

According to the National Geographic website, “In a historic visit to Brazil, Theodore Roosevelt famously saw a group of piranhas shredding pieces of a cow carcass in seconds,” but this is not true at all. Roosevelt actually contradicted that information, stating that “If cattle are driven into, or of their own accord enter, the water, they are commonly not molested.” But whatever the case, Nat Geo makes the point that Roosevelt’s “dramatic account would color popular imagination for years, even though it was based on a manipulated spectacle in which fishermen blocked off a group of the fish and starved them beforehand.”10

Point being, according to the BBC, “The piranha’s reputation as a fearsome predator may not be fully deserved . . . experts from St. Andrews University say that piranhas are omnivores who mainly eat fish, plants and insects.”11 As for grouping up like a marauding biker gang, this article explains how they school to defend themselves with fish of reproductive age positioned in the middle of the shoal. Nonetheless, the image of these fish as predators gone wild was tapped into by Hollywood, resulting in movies like Piranha and Piranha 3DD, the latter being an extremely sensationalist celebration of the B-genre horror flick with bouncing breasts and bloody fish bursting from the 3D screen—which is another way fish stories happen.12

What gets lost in this whole discussion are the possibilities that piranhas offer. For example, the Houston Chronicle reports that the flesh of this fish is “the cure for problems dealing with fertility, virility, even baldness.” The article goes on to claim that “It is said to be the ultimate aphrodisiac.” There’s an account of a fisherman’s father being sterile, but after eating piranha, he fathered three children. Similarly, “Maria Luisa Quepo, a childless woman near Pulcallpa, gave birth to twins when she was in her 40s after drinking a piranha-based brew.”13

Still, the medical community doesn’t seem to have any literature on the health benefits of piranha meat. There also seems to be a debate as to whether the taste is bitter or not—which led to my next question.

While traveling in Thailand a few years back, I was told that snakehead was commonly used in a horrible-tasting medicinal broth. I never got a chance to confirm this, but the snakehead that Wilson cooked was fried whole with its head on. Basically, it was greasy and unremarkable, unlike the one I’d grilled in Arkansas. That one was from Vietnam. I got it from an Asian market in Missouri and marinated it in a garlic chili peanut sauce. My guests and I found the meat to be firm and sabrosa, meaning “delicious.” Verdict being: it’s how you cook it.

As for the piranhas, Wilson fried them as well, serving them with limes on the side. Then came the moment of truth, where we would weigh claims of its bitter flesh versus Roosevelt’s statement that piranhas are “fairly good to eat, although with too many bones.”14

We cut into them, and the flesh was solid like a pork chop. The meat was white, and unlike chicken it wasn’t stringy. If anything, the consistency and texture resembled gar, but it wasn’t quite as rubbery. It was also quite sweet, nothing acrid about it whatsoever, and the bones were not an issue. Even more surprising, it had its own unique flavor. It was mild but savory, almost even mushroomy, and buttery and juicy as hell. I even felt confident enough to state that it was “the most muy sabrosa” fish I’d ever eaten.

Lea agreed with that, but like I said before, this wasn’t a typical fishing trip. And at that point, deep in the romantic Amazon where we’d been writing poetry to each other while waiting out the afternoon storms, anything and everything was admittedly overwhelming to us. Which is why I couldn’t trust the idea of piranha meat being an aphrodisiac: because the whole experience was just that, both physically and mentally.

Being a Minnesota boy in the Ecuadorian jungle isn’t something that happens every day, nor is being attacked by half a crazed snakehead, hauling in mythic piranhas, and getting a firsthand look at what makes these fish so monstrous in our communal vision. Because when you have fish as fangy and fantastic as snakeheads and piranhas swimming around with crocodiles and candiru catfish, there’s just no stopping the drama. Apocrypha automatically happens—to the point that we end up with a grotesque bouillabaisse we can’t fully trust. So we do what we always do, and perhaps that’s what we do best: we speculate, tell stories, imagine the worst in ourselves, and apply those qualities to a niche of the ecosystem that actually provides balance.

This dichotomy, though, that tension between what we know and what we don’t, is what attracts us to the idea of monster fish. We know they’re there, we know what they’re capable of, but what we really don’t know are the accurate, finite details of their documented behaviors.

But that’s enough demystification, because stripping fish of vicious context isn’t always helpful. That is, we could analyze our fears away, but they’d just be replaced by something else. The fact is, we need nightmares and we need scapegoats to be who we are just as much as snakeheads and piranhas need us to believe that they’re more dangerous than they really are. It’s a defense mechanism for all parties, which serves to provide distance between us.

Because if we get too close, we might see them as they really are. And if we see them as they really are, we could encroach on them like we believe they encroach on to us—when the bottom line is that we can live together conflict-free as we have for centuries: humans, snakeheads, piranhas, and all the monsters we create to keep our imaginations as alive as they can possibly be.

That’s what I thought, looking upriver, envisioning all the bends I couldn’t yet see. I was confident that pointing out who the real monsters are was a cliché as old as language itself and rarely effective in creating change. So if I was serious about finding meaning in monster fish, then I’d need an angle that would make the quest worth a damn for people other than myself.

In that instant, however, chowing down on piranha for breakfast, my future wife smiling across the table from me, I had no clue what I was after. I figured that whatever it was, it would soon reveal itself like a fish just jumping into a boat, magically supplying itself for dinner.

Man, was I wrong about that.