Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Piranha Attack - Trapped in a Bus in a River of Piranha

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Wes takes the gang through a couple of stories involving piranhas that made him, and consequently Jeff and Mike, reconsider just how dangerous the fish actually is. ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone, Tooth and Claw podcast here. We got Jeff, Mike, and Wes. Wes is our wildlife biologist. Resident biologist. Still haven't found your degree. I haven't found yet. Okay. I do have it.

I helped him out with some field work. And Mike is our tech guy. We are a wildlife podcast, and we talk about animal encounters, animal attacks. and we kind of give a perspective of why that happened and what us as humans should have done differently. It could have learned. Yeah, you know. We can learn from these things.

So when you hear the term tech guy, what do you envision? I think of the nerd squad from Best Buy. Okay. Yeah. Geek Squad, yeah. Geek Squad. Like in pop culture tech guy.

I would think of, you remember the guy in Golden Eye that has the pen where he's always twirling it. Boris? Yeah. I'm thinking of the new James Bond tech guy who's like pretty cool, almost like as cool as James Bond. Q. Yeah.

That's kind of you. That's the guy that plays Paddington. Yeah. I love Paddington. Oh, is it? Uh-huh. I didn't know that. We should probably watch Padding.

Yeah, we'll put that on our next smash bet. How accurate is that to bear behavior? He's, you know, he's from South America, so he should be an Andean bear or a spectacold bear. He doesn't look like one, so that's already a big inaccuracy. The Marmalade spot on. Yeah, they would definitely like Marmalade. Yeah. What part of the world are Teddy Bears from, usually? The U.S.

Really? I don't know. They're named after Teddy Roosevelt. Oh, yeah, that's right. Okay. Yeah, well, cool. Another one in the W column for the old U.S. of A. Guess what?

We're going to talk about Teddy Roosevelt some more today. Who are we? Yeah. Oh, cool. His big old stash. We're together. We're with Wes here in Yellowstone. We're recording from our nation's first national park.

Me and Mike drove up and he drank three drinks and then he's like, why do I have to pee? This is once again grossly misrepresenting the actuality of the situation. And then I ate seven of your fries and you're pretty mad about that. You know what? I can't be so mad. I think you were joking. Yeah. So with the lasagna, everyone remembers lasagna gate from about two years ago.

Yeah. I still think about wishing I could have tried it. Jeff neither. He didn't ask and he did not receive any lasagna. So I think in his brain now is like, I better just take some, you know? But there's like another step you could take that would be so easy for you to just get what you want. It's just to ask. Did your mom make that lasagna?

Oh, dude, don't remind me. Did she? Yeah. So Jeff will never get that lasagna. That's true. It's gone forever. It makes me want it. It's like one of those things where you can't have it now, it makes you want it more.

It's like the food and hook that they throw at each other. And it's all colorful and you can just, you can't have that food. It doesn't exist. That's how you feel when you watch hook. That's how I feel about Mike's mom's lasagna now. I'll never get it. Yeah, you guys are here. We're in Yellowstone.

We went around and looked for wildlife. Freddie lasagna. He almost caught judges 61st. All right. Home run ball. Jeff's brain. Another hard digression cooking through lasagna. This guy, I want to talk about it.

Okay, yeah, go for it. So Aaron Judge is like a baseball player, and he just tied the record for like most home runs by a Yankee player. Okay. And the ball hit this guy's glove and then like drop down onto the ground. So like him not catching that ball cost him at least like half a million dollars. Can you imagine like having half a million dollars? in your hand just like fall to the ground.

Yeah. And his name was Freddie Lazzania. Actually, I think the guy next to him was Freddie Lazzania. Okay. Yeah. You know what? I do have, I know what that feels like.

I actually had back when Charazard, the like first edition Pokemon card, I pulled a Charazard when Pokemon cards. Like the ones that Logan Paul bought for like a million dollars. Yeah, I had one of those. Really? Yeah. But like I treated it like garbage and it's all scuffed up

and I just don't even know where it is anymore, so it'd probably be worth like three bucks now. Yeah. I should see, though. You might still have it? I think so. I don't know where it could have gone. You definitely should see if it's worth that much money.

Yeah, I could be making up, again, that it's a first edition. You're going to, like, have one of our listeners go rob your house now. Yes, you're. I would if I was listening. Yeah. I might. Well, Mike and Jeff are... It would be nice to have you over, finally.

Mike and Jeff are here in Yellowstone. We went in, saw some... elk and some bison. We looked for our artifacts, some arrowheads. We didn't find any, but we saw a lot of stuff. Yeah. We had a nice morning. And then we did a lot of smash battles. Yeah, that's why we're recording right now instead of like an hour later. None of us actually wants to be recording this episode. Mike brought his switch. And if you remember, a lot of decisions we've made in our friendship has been through the game Super Smash Brothers. We just queue up like four or five computer players. We put them all on the maximum difficulty, and then we have them battle.

But before they battle, we assign decisions to each of them. So, like, if we want to pick a movie, each of them will be a different movie. And whichever one wins, we have to watch that movie. Yeah. And usually we pick one that, like, none of us wants to do. That one, we saw a bunch of elk, and we were, like, happy to be home. So then we chose we have to go back outside until we see an elk. And then we can come back and smash it.

It keeps tension high when you're watching. You really had watched the new Andor show. Yeah. Which I had already seen. Part of a football game. Yeah. Or record the episode. And luckily record the episode one.

Yeah. No, we're all kidding aside. We're happy to be here. This is great. This is what we wanted. You did mention something, West, that piqued my interest about, what, like 10 minutes ago now, that Yellowstone is the first national park. Yes. That's like, when was it, when did all that happen?

We just talked about this. Did we? I think it's 1872. Yeah. brought it up in the, I think in our subscriber episode about Frank Welch. Was it, so it's the only national park when they started national parks? Yes, it, like, maybe ignited the whole national park thing, like, worldwide. So, President Grant is the one that signed it in, but then, like, I know Roosevelt, again,

we're bringing up Teddy again, was, like, intimately involved with kind of how Yellowstone. Well, like, there's an arch named after him and stuff. Just so you know, I have a listener question asking you about. Yellowstone and just national parks in general. So should we save this discussion? Yeah, so we can come back to this later. Okay. I don't like the combination of intimacy and Freddie Roosevelt.

Teddy Roosevelt. Freddie. Freddie, what am I talking about? Freddie is brother. Freddie brother. Yeah. Freddie, Freddie. Freddie Lizzie.

Freddie Lazzade. Freddie was like, hey, what about me? Freddie. That's, yeah. What about Freddie? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, today we're going to talk about, we're talking piranas.

And the reason I picked piranhas is because I'm going to Brazil soon. I'm going to the Panthenol, which is a region that has a lot of animals. If you want, you'd have to pay your way, but you can come. There's a lot of animals. I'm not. I'm the guide. Well, how about we just split it all? I can't do that.

Anyway, I wanted to do an animal that was down there that we hadn't covered. We've covered Jaguars. So the other two I was thinking, and we covered giant ant eaters and a Patreon or a subscriber. episode. So I was thinking of either doing anacondas or piranhas. And I said a lot of piranhas. And I want to tell you guys, I've gone on a real journey with like learning about piranhas because I went into it like really remembering seeing like some TV shows and stuff talking about the movie piranhas 3D. But I have seen that. Seeing some TV shows and stuff where like animal attack shows where someone got like really torn up by piranhas. And so I was thinking.

like, okay, I'm going to be able to find some good stories about piranhas. And then I was having a really hard time. And everything I found was saying that piranhas really don't attack people and really, and never kill people. And so that was kind of like how I went into this. And then I was digging deeper and deeper and really having a difficult time. And then I found a river monsters episode where it was all about piranhas. And I was like, okay, I'm going to watch this and maybe get a little bit more context. because usually he kind of dives into the history of whatever fishies.

It's Jeremy Wade. I'm a big fan of Jeremy Wade and River Monsters. Is that like an animal planet show? Yeah, it's one of those networks. I like how you said fish hees, but it sounded like fishies. Oh, yeah. Like whatever. Fishies.

Yeah, I like that too. I'm going to say fishies for the rest of the episode. It's a good show. And like he's a biologist slash angler and like has a unique perspective on fish. There's obviously like a lot of. drama in it too that doesn't necessarily need to be there but i have learned some interesting things from that show i'm like some of these stories are from the show and then some are ones i found online but i you guys are going to see by the end of the episode that i really did a big circle on this all right

okay on the 14th of november in 1976 there's a passenger bus in northern brazil and it's making a really routine trip from the capital city of manaus to this little city called it takua tiara which is a about five hours. There's a bus in the story, Jeff, so there's going to be a built-in measure. There we go. Yeah, that's perfect. I do have to apologize, too, because in our last, or two episodes ago, and I still think about this, I talked about that 27-inch hole being ripped in the tent, and Jeff just somehow, like, like a rain man move, got the exact percentage of what that would be of a bus, and all of us, and I was kind of like, our listener, Adam, did the math. And so did someone else. were both like, it was perfect.

Yeah, which is terrible because now Jeff is encouraged and it'll never end. Well, maybe we don't want it to. It truly, though, it was like one of those a savant move. Or like a broken clock kind of thing. Exactly. Okay. So this bus in 1976, 14th November, it's making this trip from Manaus, which is really the biggest city in the middle of the Amazon to this little town.

It's about five-hour trip. It's overnight. On the bus, there were several families. There's some students. There's like some men and some women. Few piranis. There's no piranis yet. The bus is driving through the night, and the driver either, like, lost control of the bus or fell asleep.

A lot of people think he fell asleep, and they crashed into a tributary of the Amazon River. So he kind of just, like, went straight on this ferry ramp and just launched the bus into the river. Sounds like he fell asleep. Oh, wow. I think so. And as the bus plunged into the water, these passengers get obviously really scared, but the water rushes up so quickly that they're not able to open the doors or any of the windows. And on the show, Jeremy Wade talks to, like, one of the only survivors. And his name was Dezio Arauju. And he's a passenger, and he was

like one of the only people that managed to get out of this window. And there's like a kid that managed to, too. And as he fled the bus, he doesn't remember seeing any piranhas or anything, but he gets out of the bus. And as he leaves, apparently, piranhas just, like, rushed into this bus. Oh, my gosh. A couple hours later, they pull the bus from the water. 39 passengers had died. Many of them had been completely torn apart by piranhas. They're just skeletons. So I'll get into some of those details.

This Dezio guy, he was still present. He describes one carcass as being almost completely stripped of flesh with only boots remaining. He said that among the bodies that they brought out of the bus, there was like three young girls and a baby, and all of them had been completely savage by piranhas. So at first I'm kind of skeptical because everything I had read said that piranhas don't kill people that's super rare and then he interviewed another woman that was there her name was dora g barbosa and she was a young nurse she was 17 years old and just started her nurse training and

the husband of her teacher was one of the victims she said his face had been completely consumed with only cartilage she was there as like a worker she showed up like when they pulled the bus out to maybe give like medical attention to some of these people but they were all dead but like her teacher's husband, his entire face had been consumed. Only cartilage and bone was still there. Her childhood sweetheart was also one of the victims who had been consumed. And during the show, they would flash to some of the morgue photos from this. And they looked like zombies. Like, you could see bits of skeleton and just like, it looked like someone that had been decomposing for like months, not someone that had only been in the water for a couple hours.

Crazy. Like, have you guys ever seen Hellraiser? Yeah. You know skinless Frank. That's kind of what they looked like. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own.

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She's six years old. She's with a few other children in a canoe in the river. The hot Amazon weather gives way to this really, like, tempestuous storm. And these windy conditions in the canoe caused the canoe to capsize. And when it capsizes, this river's kind of moving. The grandma manages to grab these other kids, but she floats off. And they can't find her anything. And she swept away.

A while later, a search team finds her body in the river, surrounded by piranha, and the flesh on her upper legs has been completely stripped off by these fish. So this is one, both of these that we've talked about so far. Timing is really important because both of them, it's much more likely that these people drowned, and then the piranha started eating them. Because that is, like, pretty known behavior of them. They will scavenge corpses,

but they just don't really, like, in any of the literature I read in the stuff I looked at, I looked at. And I did read a lot of actual, like, scientific papers for this one. No one said that they will, like, fully attack live people. Like, kill someone that's alive. Right. Or, like, yeah, like shred them like this.

And like it's not that they couldn't maybe, but it's like those people either get out of the water or drowned type of thing. Right. And like they're not fast enough to be able to kill you. So yeah, on the official record, there's no person that's ever like their cause of death has been piranha. But we are going to talk about that some more. But so far like everything I had found, like every single article I found and we're going to do a few more stories. The title of the headline would be like person killed by piranha. but then at the end it would be like,

authorities do say it's likely this person drowned before they read by piranhas. It's like, okay, that's like that's something you need to say first. Pretty important because you're blaming an animal for something then that it didn't do. But then you can never say killed by piranhas, and that sucks. To not be able to say that. Yeah. All right. So in 2013,

an 11-year-old boy is on vacation with his family on a lake in Peru. And almost all of these are kind of in the Amazon basin or like the panama. The piran is just like all through South America. Yeah. Did you say that? I haven't said that yet, but we will get to that. When this 11-year-old boy somehow falls into the water and he can't be recovered. When his body was later recovered, almost all of the flesh and organs have been cleaned off. There's actually a video of them pulling his body onto the shore, and it is gnarly.

It's not one I'd recommend our listeners look up. It is one I'm going to show Mike and Jeff. Oh, come on, man. I was looking for it to it. Oh, no. Wow, that's intense. This is only a couple hours after him having gone in the water. No way.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's crazy. Yeah. Wow, that's a thorough job. Yeah. I mean, so to explain, and this is graphic. When I was, like, joking, like, all they saw was skeletons, like, it's true.

That is what it is. They clean a person off pretty quick. Yeah, to explain this one, like, the kid is mostly skeleton with just, like, bits of flesh hanging. And then, like, the top part of it is. his head from like his eyes up is like pristine but the rest of him is skeleton yeah it's pretty gnarly like when i saw that one i was like oh that's really horrifying yeah and so on the one of the episodes of river monsters i watched jeremy wade takes a full chicken and ties it to like a rope and puts it in the water like alive no like a dead one and it's just like a completely it's like a chicken like you picture

yeah and it's gone in like a matter of 20 seconds wow yeah so it was kind of like again, as I progressed through these stories, I was like, okay, so there maybe isn't, you know, cause of death, Parana, but they're definitely capable of it. So it kind of got me thinking and the gears turning like, okay, even though no one's officially said they've been killed by Parana, I'm starting to think that it's possible and this probably happened. All right, in 2011, an 18-year-old kid named Oscar Barbosa is traveling in Bolivia when he's on a really small ferry that takes you just across this river called the Rio Yata. And he's like with his motorcycle and he's maybe a little bit drunk and he's really hot

and he decides to jump in the river and take a quick swim. Off of a ferry? Yeah, it's just like a little ferry. It's like a picture of raft that they just pull across the river on like a rope. This middle of the jungle in Bolivia. Like in Lord of the Rings. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, like Brandy Wine Ferry.

Yeah. So he jumps in the water and he's swimming and suddenly the. the people that see him swimming, see him struggling, and then he goes under. And then when he's recovered, they say that he had been partially consumed by piranhas, especially his face and his neck. In almost all the reports I read, people said that it's very likely he drowned first, and then a lot of the news reports said that he might have been committing suicide. Oh, interesting.

Put a little pin in this one, because we're going to come back to it. That's what I learned from like every article I could read online was just like those facts. Okay. So there's a lot of these kinds of stories online. They say like person killed by piranha, but in almost every single one of them, it seemed like they probably drowned first. There's a 1987 study that looks at consumption of human corpses by piranha,

and they had three cases they looked at. All three were in the Pontanol region of Brazil, where I'm going. One was a woman who was around 25 that fell from a boat. Her body was discovered a few days later when someone noticed a lot of piranha activity on the surface, and her body had been caught in some underwater logs, and almost completely reduced to a skeleton.

Like really nothing left. A 50-year-old man drowned when crossing a river on horseback, and when his body was recovered a few hours later, he was missing the right side of his neck, his right cheek, his ear, and part of his tongue. A 70-year-old man fell into the water after a heart attack, and his body was recovered 20 hours later, all of the flesh from his head, neck, arms, and legs was missing,

and all of those areas were reduced to bare bones, and then just like his trunk was still there. So an important thing to remember, and everything we've talked about so far, it's pretty certain that most of these people drowned before they were attacked. But piranhas do bite live people. And there's a few studies that look into like these spates of piranha attacks that will happen on like beaches and lakes and stuff in Brazil and Peru and Bolivia and Argentina. And like an example of one, in 2011, 22-year-old Elsin Gcompos Pinto was visiting

Davoran Beach on the shores of the Paraguay River in western Brazil. He's lazily floating in the water. When he stands up, he feels a sharp pain in his toe. He looks down to see the tip of his toe is missing. He sprints out of the water, leaving like a trail of blood behind in the sand. There's hundreds of these. This happens, like, pretty regularly. Like, they can one bite take off part of your toe.

Or your finger or like... I guess they'd have to be able to make you a skeleton in three hours. They take like a little circle of flesh if they just get you somewhere else. but if they get you on like the end of a digit, they can get through bone and stuff. Wow. So this is like a little blurb about some of these kind of spates of piranha attacks. So in Palma's Brazil,

there was 190 piranha attacks, all involving single bites to the feet in the first half of 2007 in an artificial lake. In Sao Paulo in 2009 in a river there, there was minor injuries up to 15 people. In 2011, there was like 100 people being treated for bites in the state of POE. And then in December 2013,

there was more than 70 bathers that were attacked in Argentina causing injuries to their hands and their feet. So sometimes, like, the conditions are just right where piranhas just start really biting people. So there's a couple studies that looked at these, one that was in surname and one that was in Brazil.

And it's usually like singular bites to feet or toes, but sometimes people lose fingers, they lose whole toes. There's a bunch of photos. I'm going to post some of them to the Instagram of people with just like the end of their finger getting bit off. That's great. Yeah. You might be getting into this.

You can go ahead and you seem like you're in the middle of something. No, you can ask. I was just going to ask whether you think this is they're hungry and looking for food or if this is like exploratory like sharks do. Perfect segue. So that's exactly what I was about to talk about. Nice job, Mike. There's two kind of things that tend to lead to these spate of prana attacks. And one of them is they're often in the dry season.

When these waterways that piranha live in start to dry up, and it makes the piranhas be more concentrated, and they have fewer food options, and they tend to get a little hungrier and a little bit more aggressive. And then they also really happen when piranhas are breeding. And when they breed, they'll lay their eggs in vegetation that's usually pretty shallow. And the eggs will stick to the vegetation, and when they're fry hatch, the little baby fish will hide in that vegetation. And piranha parents are actually fairly defensive of their young. And so when like swimmers or something are stepping in those areas where they're young are, they'll give them like a warning bite. So these studies that I looked at either blamed that or like feeding behavior. So it's either like they're hungry and they just start biting people or they're like trying to defend their young.

What do they like normally eat? We're going to get into that in just second. No, you know, I'll do it now. They often eat fish, insects, crustaceans. Like a big fish? They can eat like decent size fish. Other fish eat them, though, too. Okay, so we're kind of getting into the whole facts here,

but, like, the whole idea of, like, piranha's schooling and doing this cooperation of, like, all of them attacking a big thing at once, that's not a cooperative thing. They school and shoals to actually escape predators, not to, like, kill things. Yeah. And usually they're solitary hunters. It's like the golden corral after a football game. Sure.

Like, everyone's there? It's not like they're coordinated in eating everything in the buffet, but they do it. Yeah. But they actually like, they have a lot. You landed that plane, Jeff. I got there. They have a lot of natural predators. A lot of things eat piranha.

So they're not these like vicious. They're not like the kings of the river. They're not out there just like eating whatever and not worried about anything. They're constantly worried about being eaten themselves. So they're mostly like eating things that are pretty easy prey for them where they don't really have to like risk. any kind of injury or anything. Okay. So typical prey for them is like small fish, insects, crustaceans, and then some of them,

they're actually an omnivorous fish. Some of them eat plants and nuts and fruits and stuff too. So I am curious, like, why their teeth have to be so sharp, then. Yeah, it's because they do eat meat. And so, like, they can kill things like capybara or, like, egrets or mammals. Like, they are capable of that. Capibara? Capibara.

can't be like. They really are able to eat a lot of stuff. We're going to get into more facts. Do fish, do a lot of fish eat nuts? I've never heard that before. That's super weird. It's not. But like piranha, because they live in such a rich environment and there are like

constantly nuts and fruits and stuff dropping into the water, it's a, it's like a pretty good source of food for some piranha. We'll get into this a little bit more. But we're going to put a pin in that as well. Okay. Zip. So we've talked about, you know, these stories where like people were complete. consumed by piranha.

And then we've talked about... You show there's a horrifying video. Yeah, it is awful. Sorry, but I saw it, so I wanted you guys to see it. And then we talked about what are actual piranha bites, actual piranha attacks, where, like, someone gets bit on their foot or their leg or something, and it's usually, like, very superficial. You're missing a chunk, or you have, like, a cut,

but it's, like, maybe a stitch or two or even less. So where did this myth of man-eating piranhas that can completely strip a human for their flesh in minutes come from? It probably came from Teddy Roosevelt. So in 1913, Teddy Roosevelt had just lost his bid, his third bid for being president. He'd already been president twice. Back then, you could run a third time. And he lost his bid.

And after that, he decided to kind of go travel the world. And one of the main places he went was the Amazon Basin. And he went on this really long expedition. There's a book I read called The River of Doubt that's all about that expedition. It's really good. I recommend it. It's really interesting. He almost died a couple of times.

times. I don't want to celebrate Teddy Roosevelt too much because he also did some really heinous stuff, but he was also like a really intrepid explorer. He liked getting out and seeing things. All right. So on this expedition, he became really acquainted with piranhas and he really hated them. Like when you read his excerpts about piranhas, he describes him as being like demons. He really doesn't like piranhas. And here's a quote from his book that he wrote called Through the Brazilian Wilderness. So this book is Through the Brazilian Wilderness. So this book is Through the Brazilian wilderness. They're the most ferocious fish in the world, even the most formidable fish, the sharks and 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. In every river town, there are men who have been thus mutilated. They will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast, for blood in the water excites them to madness. they will tear wounded fowl to pieces and bite the tails off big fish as they grow exhausted when fighting after being hooked. Some of that is true. Like when people hook a fish, sometimes piranha will eat it. They will tear like dead birds or wild fowl to pieces. But this whole idea of them instantly attacking any person that enters the water, we know isn't true.

He also famously said that piranhas could strip an entire cow of its flesh in minutes. And there's actually a good reason he thought this. And this is a kind of crazy story. Mike, you're nodding like you might know this. I just have always heard the cow thing. I've never known where that came from. Yeah. So there's a really interesting, like, genesis to that name.

Gavris brought that up on High and Mighty. Oh, yeah, I think he did. Yeah. Apparently, there's this tributary of the Amazon. Like, it was a tributary of a tributary that the Brazilians decided to name after Teddy Roosevelt because he was, like, visiting and he's an ex-president. He's this big dignitary that was, like, coming to the Amazon.

So they named this little tributary after him. him and he goes to visit it. And when he went to visit it, they decided to, like, be ready for him and to kind of put on a show. So, like, unknown to him, they put nets, like, in a couple hundred yards of this river, they put nets on both sides. So, like, this part of the river was blocked off, like, no fish come in or out. And then a bunch of these fishermen went out and just caught, like, tons of piranha.

And piranha are really easy to catch. I've fished for him before. You need a tiny chunk of meat. You stick your hand in it. Put your toe. In the video, someone doing that, just like letting him bite his hand and then put him in the boat. Oh, geez, that's risky. You can put, like, just a tiny chunk of meat, and the second it hits the water, you can, like, pull a piranha out.

Okay. And so they just go out and catch, like, hundreds, if not thousands of piranha, and they put them in this little, like, walled off stretch of river, and then they don't let any other food in there. So they starve these piranha, and they're just, like, way more concentrated than they ever would be in the wild, and they're all starving. So when Teddy Roosevelt shows up, they're like telling them like, hey, don't go in the stretch of water. If a man goes in there, they get eaten by piranha, you know, and he doesn't know they've done all this. And then he's like skeptical that any fish could be that dangerous. And then to validate their point, they take this really sick old cow who has like this problem where she's like bleeding out of her udder. Or no, she had like a discharge.

And then they slit her udder open actually. So she's bleeding, which is a terrible thing to picture. and they drive her into the water. And when she does, these piranhas go nuts. And they eat this cow and, like, rip it apart because they've been starved. And there's way more of them than there generally would be. And he's just, like, watching this totally stunned and is just like, oh, piranhas are gnarly. And this whole thing had been staged by this really famous Brazilian ethiologist,

like a fish biologist named Miranda Hiberio. Why did he, like, want him to believe that? I think he just, like, I think it was just kind of like a prank. Yeah. Like they thought it would be funny. Okay. So this is like burned into his brain. And that's why throughout his book, through the Brazilian wilderness, he mentions, like, how ferocious and terrible piranhas are.

It's a good prank. Yeah. On who? The cow. Just everyone. The world. That's true. That's like one of the most successful pranks ever pulled.

This summer, serve up the cookout classics, craft mayo and dressing. Toss green salads with delicious ranch dressing or zesty. Italian, serve smooth, craveably creamy potato salads with mayo. We all know it's not a cookout without craft. So I mentioned they shawl up more for like predator avoidance than for attacking things. They're generally solitary feeders. They're up to 60 species of piranha. It seems like there's a lot of disagreement how many there actually are. It's somewhere between 30 and 60. They're native to South America. But the aquarium trade has actually brought them to some other countries. So like people have let them go in other riverways. So both Bangladesh and China have like

established piranha populations in some of their waterways. And then red bellied piranha are probably the species that are most commonly implicated in attacks. So red bellied piranha are usually the ones you see in like movies or whatever where they're showing people getting killed by piranhas. So they have a single row of interlocking teeth on both their upper and lower jaws. So it's like they have really sharp triangular teeth. It looks like if a kid drew. of when the teeth interlock. Yeah, they look like shark teeth. Yeah.

And they just like go right in between each other. And they're razor sharp. And they have like a really similar enamel structure to sharks. Like they look just like mini shark teeth. A really interesting thing about their teeth is we've learned about kind of that conveyor belt of teeth that sharks have. Yeah. With piranha, they replace them in quarters. So like if they lose part of their jaw, like that whole part of teeth like come back up.

Just as like one used piece? Sometimes you'll see piranha that have like three-fourths of their teeth and the other fourth is missing, and then that whole fourth will like come back up. So they replace them in quarters. I don't totally understand the mechanics behind that, but there's a whole scientific paper on it. And if we ever do another episode of Parano, I'll read that one. But it was really dense and I just didn't have time for it. Yeah.

So aside from buoyancy, they use their swim bladder as a resonator. So their swim bladder helps them like stay buoyant in the water. But there's actually acts like a resonant. or two and they make some really cool low frequency harmonic sounds from their their swim bladder and if you pull up her on out of the water and I remember this when I caught him sometimes you hear like this drumming noise coming from them and it's their swim bladder like resonating and typically in nature they use that as like a communication tool between each other which is really cool they have one of the highest bite forces for their size among all fish I read somewhere in

my research that if you were to like scale them up to the size of a shark their bite force would be like 30 times stronger than a shark. And I did, again, like fishing for them, sometimes you hear them like chomping on the hook and you hear it. It's like, it's like loud. And you know there's some power there. Like they can take off the end of your finger. They're attracted to blood, noise, and splashing. Pinky. Yeah. So there's no officially documented case of a person whose cause of death is piranhas.

but like I said, I think it's almost certain that it has happened. And as I was watching that episode of River Monsters, it kind of takes a turn because Jeremy Wade's saying the same thing. He's like, they don't kill people. He even has like a pool full of piranhas that he gets in. After giving them meat and blood, he like gets in there with them completely and submerges himself and they like don't pay any attention to him. And he's like, you know what, this is true.

All these biologists, marine biologists are itheologists that he's talking to are like, yeah, they don't kill people. They're not what we think they are. But at the very end of this episode, he's in this like place. It's a small community on the Amazon River, and it's full of these people called River Rinoes, which are like people, they get everything they need from the Amazon. And they sometimes even live on those homes that kind of like half stick out over the water. Oh, yeah. Those are cool. Yeah. And like this area that he visited is famous for having a really large number of Red Belly Piranhas. And during the show, he's fishing for them and even sticks like a dead burden and they like

chew it to bits. And he's talking about it. And then suddenly he's like talking to this family and they're like, oh, we lost a grandson to piranhas. And they tell this story. And they lived on a house that's connected to the river and there's lots of small children in this house. It's like a multifamily house.

Tons of little kids running around. And one day the mother of the family was cleaning some fish. And so there's all these chunks of fish and blood and stuff going in. to the river. And when you do that, you do get a lot of piranha that, like, congregate. And piranha, what do they do, what they do do sometimes is like, do do do do. Yeah. They do that too. Is they like, if there's a good food source and one of them decides to go up and bite it, it triggers all the other ones to be like, oh, there's food. And they launch into this kind of feeding frenzy where they all just go crazy. And that's what you see in the movies and stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Where the water's like bubbling and they're all going nuts. They do that sometimes. and it's especially common if someone's like cutting a ton of fish or something into the river and that's what the mom was doing and while she was doing this the two-year-old grandson sprinted through the house and into the river and fell in the water and he disappeared into the water and they like went to go get him and by the time they even got there he had already been killed by piranha and they got some nets and pulled him out and by the time they got him they said he had been like big chunks of his body had been reduced to bones so it was really And he was a pretty small kid.

And like seeing those piranha tear apart that chicken, I do think this is possible. And this was like a first person account that he had with these people. And I kind of think that you can say this is a person that was killed by piranha. I don't think he drowned before he was killed. Yeah. Then there was another episode that he did where remember that guy I told you about that was drunk that was on the ferry that jumped that jumped in and had his like face eaten, but that all the things said that he had drowned first and there was maybe suicide. So Jeremy Wade looked into that one too.

And apparently, like, this guy had jumped off the ferry and just like I said, like he got attacked by piranhas. But he talked to one of the ferrymen that was there. And this guy said that he like tied a rope to himself and jumped in to pull this guy out. And it took him a little while to find him. But when he finally found him and pulled him out, he was already like completely ripped up. And he thinks like this guy was like, no, he bled out. Like that's how he died. Oh, wow.

Because he wasn't under long enough to have drowned. Yeah. And then this guy is like, don't believe me, go talk to this ranch up river. So Jeremy travels up river and he's talking to this ranch and he's expecting to get another idea like of a person attacked by piranhas. And they tell him the story of like they found this horse that belonged to a neighbor ranch. And Mike, you're going to like this story.

They're leading this horse across the river. And right as they're about to get out, the horse starts like kicking and going all crazy. And it was being attacked by piranhas. and within seconds they mutilated this horse bat enough that it died in the river. Oh my gosh. And I kind of believe it all because I watched him like fishing in this river and the piranhas were just nuts. And he looked into it and he thinks that like this other fish had been introduced that was like a big predator of the piranhas and it was eating a lot of their food sources and it was making them turn to alternative food sources, which I don't know. It was an interesting theory.

Who knows if that's actually it? but I just wanted to bring this up because I kind of went full circle on this. I started thinking piranhas kill people. Then I like really bought into this idea of like, whoa, they are completely misrepresented. They don't. He got in a pool with them, all this stuff. And then I kind of went back to like, okay, there are some conditions where piranhas might kill people. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think if you're in an area where like someone's been cleaning fish or if there's like something that's really caused those specific groups of piranha to become extra aggressive there is the ability for them to kill a person yeah it seems like if you weren't super close to shore they could probably get you before you could get to shore yeah yeah and like they if enough of them are getting at you like they can yeah do a lot of blood loss really quickly for my research in piranha 3d they can they can they go for naked girls yeah yeah So it was a really interesting thing for me.

I want to like this, we're going to go into pop culture piranhas, but like I want to talk about before we get into it, my least favorite pop culture. And this kind of, it feeds into this idea of like how dangerous they are, Coyote Peterson. And then some other people have done videos where they're like the like the title of the video will be like eaten alive, human hands versus piranha. Yeah. And it'll be like him. And he's like, I'm about to do it. You know, and he's like, I'm going to put my hands in these tanks. And he puts it in the tank.

And he's like, oh, they're hitting me with their tails. And he's getting all like groaning and like so scared. And they're just doing nothing. And then they like pour blood in there or like put in like some meat and they do absolutely nothing. And then almost worse than him is this show called Kings of Pain. And they, I think they're a little bit better in general. but the episode with the piranhas, they, like, do the same thing. The guy, like, coats his arm in blood, puts it in the tank.

They do absolutely nothing. And then they pull a piranha out and, like, force it to bite this guy. Like, they put it on his arm and, like, push it against his arm until it bites him. And then he's like, oh! And, like, screaming. And it's really not that bad. It doesn't... Because it's just, like, a straight bite.

It's not shaking back and forth or anything. Yeah. So it's kind of, like... They should make him crash a bus into the pond, and then... see if they get it. Yeah, exactly. I do think, like, they're not an animal that attacks you, just like, they don't deserve this reputation of if you jump into piranha water, they're going to bite you. Right. There has to be these specific conditions to lead to piranha attacks, and then they have to be even, like, more specific for them to consume a person, unless you're a

corpse, and then sooner or later, they will consume you. So, yeah, right. Anyway, those are our stories about piranha. There's a whole other story of like this fairy that crashed where hundreds of people died and they think a lot of those people are killed by piranha that I'm saving for another episode because it's really interesting. But for now, that's all we're going to talk about for stories about piranha. Do you guys have any questions? I have one that's not piranha. You know the movie The Rundown? Yeah, I kind of remember. Sean Williams. I feel like that was the first rock movie I ever saw. I wish they were to last. So they talk about how there's a parasite when you swim in the Amazon?

It's a catfish. That will swim up your purithole? Yeah. Is that true? It is. What happens when that happened? It's only happened like twice. Ever?

Yeah. And I think that the idea was that it was like attracted to the warmth of maybe someone peeing and then it went up there, but then they have these barbs that they put out. Oh. And you have to have it like you have to have your penis cut open to get it removed. Okay. Yeah. So if you are ever in like the Amazon basin and your source.

swimming. Put a little tape over it. Or just like maybe pee before you get in the water. I think the main thing is don't pee in the water. But it's super, it's happened like twice, maybe once. Super glue it.

Are you guys pool peers? Yeah. Sometimes. You don't, Jeff? Yeah. Because I, I really don't.

Because I don't want other people peeing in the pool. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't pee. It's probably been two out of three. It's been a long time since I've done it. It has. A couple days.

It's not, no, it's not like something I do every time. But I, It's not like a rule for me that I wouldn't. If I really got to pee in a pool, I'd probably pee. Yeah, I don't do it anymore. I wouldn't do it in a hot tub, I don't think.

Well, it depends on how big the pool is. Another reason not to pee. I guess rivers aren't pools, but just don't. How about that? Yeah. There might be one of those little ones in a pool. You know, Mike, I won't pee in pools anymore. It's probably been five or six years since I'd peeed in a pool.

I don't believe you. That's not either. Your answer was too quick. Well, I, like, I used to pee in pools. I mean, I've admitted to plenty of. stuff on this podcast. I'm not going to like back away now. All right. Okay, you guys have any other questions about piranhas? That was not a question about a piranha. No. Just point that out. The catfish thing is called like a cat. It's a catfish. Yeah. It's a weird. It's a tiny little

catfish. It starts with the sea. They talk about it in Anaconda in the movie. Anyway, okay. So we're going to get into our favorite. We're going to get in our categories. Wait a minute. I did have one. For some reason, I thought we were going into, like, facts about piranhas. We did them already. How big are they? Like, did we go over that really? So there's, like, like I mentioned, there's a lot of species.

Yeah. Red-Billy piranhas are, like, about the size of, like, a dinner roll. Small pancake. They're not very big. Yeah, like a small pancake. But then there's some really big species that can get, like, the size of, like, a dinner plate, like a big one or even a little bigger. Like the center of a steering wheel.

A hubcap. Where you honk. Yeah. The center of a bus is a little like. Hubcap. Here. I know some of the articles I read had like a description of how big they were. They're in between 5 to 14 inches long.

A few can grow longer. Some of them can get up to 20 inches long apparently. But I would say from what I've seen and from the research I did, the biggest ones are like a dinner plate. The smallest ones are like a really small like a small, I don't know, like a silver dollar or something. But Red Billy Peron are the most common. and they're like a dinner roll size. Do people eat them? Yeah, they're delicious.

Really? I've had a lot of piranha. They're for fish. I don't like fish that much, but they're pretty good. They're not that fishy. It's like a really light, flaky, white meat. In Brazil, sometimes they cook them whole usually, and you eat like the eyes and the brain and everything.

Oh, nice. But they're really bony. But then like piranha soup. They do it to us. That's true. They call it Caldo G. They call it Caldo G. It's like a Pirana.

It's like a pia aniazza soup. But anyway, I got to work on my poor cheese. I'm going down there soon. It's been a little while. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle. And when you download the Ralph's app, you can clip and save more with digital coupons every week. Plus, you can earn fuel points to save up to $1 per gallon at the pump. At Ralph's, you can enjoy more ways to save and more rewards every time you shop.

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Priceline, download the Priceline app or visitpriceline.com and book your next trip today. Go to your happy price, price line. All right, so any other questions? No. Yeah. All right. And a lot of fishermen get bit because they're like trying to take the hook out or something and they get bit. That happens pretty often.

So our favorite pop culture piranha, I'll go first. I was having a hard time finding them. I feel like they're ubiquitous in pop culture. and for some reason I just couldn't remember any good examples of like piranha. But one I remembered was a far side cartoon where there's like a bull. Yeah, the cat in the background. And the bull says piranha. And then the cat's missing.

It's two front legs. It's got peg legs. That was mine. Oh, okay. We'll share that. Yeah. Oh, that's yours too. I'm going with Minion.

You like Minions? I've never seen the Minions movies. Have you? I'm going with Minion from Mega Mind. the Megamind, you know Mega Mind? Yeah, there's a minion in there?

The fish that's in the tank? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's a Piranha. A piranha. Yeah, that's right. Uh-huh. Yeah. So Minion, Megamind's pet, like, piranha guy.

That's a funny movie. I love it. Yeah. Like that, once I thought of that one, I was like, oh, yeah, that's a good one. I'm not beating Minion. I think that movie that came out recently, the bad guys that was an animated one,

there's a piranha in that, too. Yeah, I think. You think you're right. But he's not a bad guy. Yeah. Because minion is great. Okay. That's a good pick.

Piranha's... He plays dead and you think he's dead and he's joking. Yeah. That's right. They need more representation. They do. But I feel like there's so many things where you see them. I just couldn't think of them.

I thought there's a Calvin and Hobbs too. If someone out there can remember the Calvin and Hobbs strip where there's piranha, please send it to me. And just like a little non-sequit or two. I've swam in a lot of waterways where there's like tons of piranha. like where we're fishing for him and just pulling them out one after another. Never gotten bit, was never worried about it. And then when I go back to the pontonol, I'm going to swim,

and I'm not going to worry about it. You're so brave. Thanks. All right. So now we're going to do where Mike and Jeff paying attention. And since we're together, yeah, you are. Since we're together, I'm putting money on the table. Oh, wow.

Good old. Whoever wins this one gets $100 bill. Mr. Franklin. I mean, yeah. I just put $1,000 on the table. Okay, so who wants to go first? Me, I want to. Okay.

What is the piranha species most commonly implicated in attacks? Red belly. Correct. One point for Mike. I'm going to put an M next to that one. Jeff, how do piranhas replace their teeth? Quarterly. Correct.

Once every three months. In quarters. We'll count that. Mike, quarterly would be every four months, but in quarters is how they do it, but that's fine. Mike, why do piranhas group up in shoals or schools? It's a defensive tactic to get away from danger, correct. Jeff, I said this pretty quick, but I did say it. How old was the girl that fell out of the canoe drowned and was eaten by piranhas?

Yeah, it's either six or seven. I'm going to say six. Six, correct. Mike also you know that one no also said this one fast Mike how many people died on the bus accident in Brazil in the 70s uh 30 9 39 people 39 yeah correct what nice good pull jewell holy cow name that was a good one oh man jeff name one one other country where piranas have been introduced due to the aquarium trade One other, what does that mean?

One other country where piranhas are now beside South America. Okay. Pranhas. Correct. Okay, these last two are the hard ones. Mike, tell me the name of Teddy Roosevelt's book about his travels in Brazil. Oh, man. You said it twice.

I said it three times, and I made sure to say it three times. I can't even begin to guess. Jeff, do you want to try and steal? I need it exactly right. Adventures in Brazil. Through the Brazilian woods. wilderness. Jeff, I actually think this one's a little easier than Mike's. What organ do piranhas use as a resonator? Um, they, their heart. Mike, do you want to try and steal? Bladder? Something

a bladder or something. I don't know. You got to be a little more specific. Okay, whatever. Guess. I can, I'm, you're halfway there. A gall bladder. Swim bladder. What the hell is that? That's what they use for buoyancy. Is that a thing that most animals fish have? guys tied so I'm taking my money back. Just ripped me and half. That was good though. You guys had some good polls. All right. Yeah, we want half and half. Sure. Rip by half. Can't do it. That's a felony. That's okay. Get arrested. All right. It's a hundred dollar. Our next category is

what would Mike and Jeff do? So I'm just going to, we talked about a lot of stories. I'm going to set up. I'm thinking that King Solomon story, when you just swear about. to rip that out. And who was like, don't rip it. He's like, I'm going to cut this baby in half and you can both have half. It's such a psychotic way to decide who's the mom. It works. It's such a psychotic thing to teach kids too. Yeah. Well, this dude was really smart. He's about to cut this baby who loved the baby like would let the other one have it. It's like, who's this other lady who's like fine with half of a like baby cut in half. I know. And who's this king? Like how are we celebrating him for being wise and great.

Like, how is that a good idea? All around. It's bad. All right. So what would Mike and Jeff do? I'm just going to set up a scenario. You have fallen into the river in Brazil. Someone had been cleaning fish there.

Oh. And you're starting to get bitten by piranha. What are you doing? Death roll. Death roll. Okay. Do you remember what I said they're attracted to? Commotion.

Yeah. Blood and commotion. But I think if. I spun fast enough they couldn't hang on. They couldn't bite. You're just flinging piranasaub. Yeah. Okay.

So really fast death roll. Mike, you got an answer? Just bite them back, I guess. Do they, I guess it depends on how deep the river is. I'm going to say you're like waist deep. Okay. Yeah. You're fast swimming.

Get out of the rivers, my plan. That's like probably the right answer. Yeah. Yeah. So the good answer here is get out as quick as you can. And then death roll. The best way to avoid piranha attack, again, is like the number one thing I would say is to avoid swimming in areas where someone's just like cleaned an animal or there's blood or like fish parts or anything in the water. That's the number one thing.

After that, the main things are like, if you're bleeding, probably be a little bit more careful and then don't make a lot of commotion in the water. They actually are attracted to commotion. So when you're fishing for piranha, you actually like slap the water with your bait and stuff. it makes them, instead of scaring them off, it brings them in. So. Well, what I didn't tell you with my answer is, is actually me, you, and Mike all fall in. Mm-hmm. So I'm sacrificing myself. So you guys come, I tell you guys, like, go. Go to shore. Yeah. And then I just start death rolling to bring them all into me. Okay. Yeah. Thanks. All right. One of the articles I read, it was like, if you have some meat, throw the meat away from you. It's like, what's just it?

Who just has meat. You happen to be holding some raw stakes, throw them. All right. Okay, so let's go into our listener questions. Let's do it. Yeah. All right. Madeline wants to know what's the best prank ever pulled on you guys by your siblings?

That's a good question. For me, when I was like six or something, you guys told me NASA had just called you, and you wanted me to test suitcases that they were going to fly to the moon. So I was like, oh, I got to do that. So mean. Just like shoved me into this like hard yellow suitcase and started like shaking me like, oh, Jeff, you're going down the stairs. And then they were like, well, actually, let's push them down the stairs and just started like pushing me down the stairs in this little suitcase. Like a few times.

We had a big staircase too. It was like a long one. and we pushed Jeff all the way down in the suitcase. How many times? Probably three or four times. Yeah. Yeah. And Jeff would like open it.

We'd open it up and be like, okay. I was like, this one could make it to space. We'd be like, no, we need another trial. Yeah, that was pretty bad of us. I always feel like kind of a dick when you told that. It's pretty funny. So what I thought of is, like for some reason when we'd go ice fishing as kids, my dad would always somehow end up picking like the coldest day of the year to go.

And once we went, it was like negative 20. And we went to this lake called Georgetown Lake that's like pretty high elevation. And we didn't have like the huts and stuff that people use when they're ice fishing. It was just us and like our Walmart like jackets out on like a chair. And I remember that day it was so cold that like your ice fishing hole, the second you cleared the ice off of it, a new little thin layer would refreeze. So the entire time you're fishing, we use like a kitchen spoon to just be scraping ice out of the hole. It was just miserable, like terrible.

And we did it for like maybe an hour before I finally. He's like, Dad, can we go home? And he's like, yeah, we should just go because it was so cold. And right before that, though, or right before we left, my brother, Cyrus, my older brother, who's two years older, was like, Wes, come here. I got to show you something. And like unknown to me, he had covered his. ice fishing hole in snow and I'm like run over the little trusting brother that I am I'm like

probably seven or eight and just like plunge through no hold on the way I heard it was he called you over and you went and stood right next to the hole uh-huh he's like no stand over like a foot to the left and he just like stepped to the left that's probably what happened and I like I did a full split like my leg went all the way up to my crotch and my other one like stuck out on me guys and I was like ah and like screaming and my dad had to like pull me out and I think he thought it was really funny but it was like one of those times where he had to act

like he was angry because it was so cold and that was like the end of the day after that so we like left after that Cyrus had a few of those he's good at pranks there was one where like him and my dad or like him and our dad he was just like three or four years old and they went on like a high

hike and sigh was like dad i need to go pee and our dad was like uh it's a wilderness sun you can pee wherever you want and then like five seconds later just felt like this war warm stream on his leg cyrus was just peeing right on his leg oh cyrus you got any um no my i love so i love my family and a large part of that is because we never prank each other. Just let it, let each other be happy and are looking for the comfortable thing in your, in like the rice pudding or whatever. That's just like a family.

No one's ever pulled a prank in there. The Christmas almond? No. The Christmas almond. Yeah, I love the Christmas almond. It's tradition like none other. And then one more from subscriber. From Kara.

If you could take any movie and replace all the actors with Muppets except for one actor, what movie would it be? and which actor would stay human. My friend Kyle said no country for old men and keep Javier Bardem. That's a good pick. Keep Kurt Russell. I say lonesome dove and keep Tommy Lee's cow.

I'm going to say Fast and Furious Five, but I'm keeping Vin Diesel as an actor. Everyone else is a Muppets. They're doing a big heist. This pick isn't probably going to mean anything to you two, but I'd pick the movie The Third Man and keep Holly as the only human in it

and just have like the big reveal I shouldn't even spoil this Yeah I want to see it still There's a huge reveal mid movie Where the light kind of shines down on a character And it's like oh my gosh It's that person And it would just be a Muppet

And that would be just the most incredible I'm going Halloween And you keep Mike Myers And everyone else is a month He's just murdering Muppets That'd be a good one That's a good fit We keep saying Mike Myers

Austin Powers killing people. Great question, Gara. Shout out, Kara. Okay, from Daisy K. Daisy K. Bingham. Which members of One Direction are the different bear species? Oh, geez.

Bring him up real quick. Yeah. Harry Stiles was one, right? Was he part of One Direction? And he's like the most charismatic and well-like. He's got to be a koala. Those aren't bear species. I would say, I kind of would say that maybe he's, he's either a grizzly, or he's probably like a panda,

because everyone loves pandas and think they're cute and stuff. He's probably the panda. Zane. Zane's very handsome, right? Yeah, and I feel like he's a, he's a, I'm going polar bear. Is he the biggest? I think he might be. Yeah, we'll give him polar, sure.

Okay, Lewis Tomlson. Yeah, he's kind of like a, he's like pretty, right? Yeah. So let's say he's grizzly. Okay. I don't know. This is like... Liam Payne?

I don't know what he is. He should be the grizzly. I'm putting Lewis as a black bear. Okay. And then Nial, we're going... Nile. Nile. He's the sunbear?

Okay. All right, I'll leave that one up to you. Oh, man. Okay. Mike, you got any input? No, I just feel older now. Harry's style is the only one I can picture. Okay.

Yeah. So this one, he put it out here so I feel like he's fair game for us Scott love the podcast

I'm curious to get your thoughts would it be valid to say that National Park specifically Yellowstone comes to my mind are actually less natural because there is no human predation going on aside in parentheses aside from the removal of

problem animals and the occasional coal the suit of animals on the landscape the suite of animals on the landscape have historically dealt with bipedal predation since well forever for example

part of me gets really sad seeing all the elk around mammoth just hanging out near pop machines and the people cruising through plus why does that NPS allow plus why does that MPS allow the take of fish and not hunting? So why do they allow to, yeah, fishing and not hunting? The North American model of conservation is evidence that through proper regulation, healthy populations can be maintained while using the resource.

Right. So he's pretty much just saying, why are we not hunting animals in national parks? Yeah. Because he's saying like the North American model of conservation, which to be honest, I don't love, because it prioritizes game species. So like... He finishes saying part of me thinks things would be best to turn it into federally designed wilderness. Right, because he's saying if it's that way, then it could be hunted. Designated wilderness?

Okay. So like the idea behind the North American model of conservation is that hunters buy permits and whatnot, and a lot of that money goes towards conservation. But what I've learned firsthand is that then you have these species that are really prioritized. So like elk and deer are really prioritized and a lot of the money goes toward making sure they're okay. And a lot of animals that hunters don't like, like wolves and grizzly bears, are like considered pests almost. And so it's not, in a lot of ways, it's not a very fair model of conservation. It's kind of what we work with and what we have. But I much prefer like the model

of conservation of having like a preserve where you're just doing everything you can to give the animals the resources they need to like have healthy populations. So in the park, for example, we have healthy populations of elk, of bison, of grizzlies that are like at carrying capacity. Like that's what the ecosystem can support. And it's not like, you know, people aren't deciding what those numbers should be.

So I get what he's saying, like historically, you know, indigenous people will say hunted those animals, but also historically they didn't have huge cities and stuff that destroyed tons of habitat like yeah the animals had habitat right and there was a lot more of them so like it didn't matter that there was this extra predator on the landscape taking out like a chunk of them and there was a lot more back then there just was like historical records show that there was a lot more animals yeah and now we don't have that many and like i think it's great that we have these areas where animals have a refuge where they're not hunted by humans like with

high-powered rifles. You know, it's a whole different thing too. And I'm not against hunting. Like, sometimes I hunt, but I do think, like, this idea that that's the way conservation needs to be, like, through hunting. Like, they need us to hunt them. Yeah, I don't agree with that. I don't think that's how it has to happen.

Yeah, like, you look at national parks and they have the best wildlife. Right. Like, they have, like, if you want to see a bear, where are you going to go? Right. Right. And, like, part of that is because of what he's saying, like, there have been. So they're so easy to see but like the elk and mammoth are habituated because they planted this grass and mammoth that they really like But it's not that they're like it's because they're not being hunted, you know? Yeah, yeah

There's plenty of elk that people hunt in like fields in farmers fields where they like walk up to them The numbers are better in national parks for right So they're going to spill into some of those areas. Yeah, so I'm not trying to like I'm not trying to dismiss his question. I think it's a good question but I do think people in North America sometimes are stuck on that being like the model that works and it works because we've like prioritized hunting and it doesn't need to be that way. Yeah. Okay, from sketch tory, in your opinion, what animal has the scariest teeth? Piranhas?

Piranhas are up there. They're pretty scary. For me, it'd probably be one of those deep sea like anglerfish or something like that. The ones that have those really long, like string. needle-like teeth. For me, it's probably anglerfish. I'm going to extinct. I'm going to saber-tooth tigers.

They're the scariest? Okay. Sabre-toed tigers. Teeth were insane. Okay. Well, I'll go T-Rex then. Probably. You know what else?

Yeah, that's a good one. Or one of those, like, microscopic bugs that you, like, a billion times magnification, they look like dune worms, basically. Yeah. I was going to say lampreys, which are those fish that, like, latch on. They have the circular row of teeth, and they're really scary. Yeah, I don't like that. Yeah.

Okay, from Jessica Poole. Mike, do you also dislike donkeys or zebras? No way, dude. Donkeys are sweet. Have you seen like... Shrek? Well, yeah. Have you seen Trek one and two and three?

About zebras. Zebras are cool, too. They have like more... It's mainly just horses. Zebras kind of have like the punk mohawk action going on plus the stripes. Some horses. The coloration is really cool. I'm not going to fight you on this.

All right. That's it. Cool. All right, so we're going to do a quick conservation corner. It's going to be really quick because piranhas are fine. They're like the riverways are full of them down there. Specifically, there's probably some species of them that might be in trouble, but red belly piranhas are the ones we mostly talked about.

And they are like thriving from what I can tell. So it's very quick. Okay. And our last category is how much do we like them? So we'll do our claw ratings. Jeff will do his overall rating. Yeah. I'm going to be in the 100.

Okay. I'm going to say, I'm going to give them a six. I think they're really cool. I think it's neat. Like, fishing for them was really fun. I think they're a cool looking fish and their teeth are really neat. Maybe I'll give them a seven even. I'll give them a seven.

Yeah. I'm going to go with a six. Okay. They're cool, but I still not sure I completely like them. I think they got a cool name. Yeah. Piranha's a cool name. Um, and I'm going,

Pira. I'm going 400. 24. That's lower than I would have thought for a six. Okay, though. I'm not trying to make any sense of it. Lower, what, what? I would have thought it would have been like a four to be in the four hundreds or a five.

But I don't know. That's fine. Higher than you would have thought then. I don't know. Now I'm confused. Yeah. I can't tell if the fact that they're less dangerous than I'd always believed makes them more or less cool. You know?

Because before I would have been like, oh, man, Manny. eating crazy tooth fish. Yeah. It's like an eight. That like group attack and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I almost feel bad saying it, but learning that they're not so dangerous makes

me think a little less of them. Yeah. Which is paradoxical, maybe. I kind of always have a sweet spot for our misunderstood animals, though. Yeah. I'll go with a six. Okay. So two sixes and a seven.

Well, great. That's our first episode on Piranha. There might be another one down the line sometime, but not for a bit. maybe in a few years. Yeah. If we're still here. Maybe once you get back from Brazil, you'll have a couple of stories. Maybe I'll get bit.

In our listener questions, there's been like a bunch, every time there's like, when you're doing Treadwell, we're saving it. We're saving Treadwell. We're going to be around a while. We got to save some heavy hitters. We got a lot of heavy hitters still, like Steve Irwin's story. Right. Treadwell.

Once we're as big as Rogan. Yeah. Then some other ones that I want to do that kind of are in the works. Day are like the New Jersey shark attacks from 1916. We've got the Tiger by John Valiant, the book about the Siberian tiger that killed multiple people. Oh, yeah. There's some, we still got some really good stories that we're kind of spread out.

We got King Kong. That's a good one. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks guys. And let's go look at some out. All right. All right.

See you guys. Bye. Bye. Bye.