Piranha Bite In Indiana City Lake!

Young fisherman pulls piranha out of City Lake
Posted: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 - 11:52:12 am EDT
By Nathan Blackford-Warrick Publishing Online


Shaun Seibert holds the Red-Bellied Piranha he caught out of the Boonville City Lake on May 22.

This is a fish story with some teeth to it.

On May 22, 12-year-old Boonville resident Shaun Seibert was fishing with his father in the Boonville City Lake when he got a bite on his line. What he pulled in was more than a small surprise.

“It was really weird. The first thing I saw was its red stomach,” said Seibert. “Everybody was yelling at me to hurry up and get it out of the water before it snapped the line.”

What Seibert had hooked was a Red-Bellied Piranha - yes, a piranha - that is commonly found in the Amazon and its tributaries. The Pygocentrus nattereri can reach up to 12 inches in length, though this one was a little bit smaller.




Seibert, who will be a seventh-grader at Boonville Junior High School this fall, goes fishing at the City Lake fairly regularly. He was using a worm as bait when he caught the piranha.

“I was really, really excited,” he said. “But I was kind of confused, too.”

According to Randy Lang, the fisheries specialist with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR), a fish like a piranha is caught in an Indiana body of water about once every year or two. The fish come from personal aquariums and have been released into public waterways, which is illegal.

“These things show up more often than they should,” said Lang. “People who have fish that outgrow them, they have a kind heart and they want to do something for the fish that they can feel good about. But putting a fish like that into public waters, you run the risk of that fish having an impact that may have long-term consequences.”

In the case of the piranha caught by Seibert, because the fish is a warm-water species, it is probable that it had only been in the lake a short period of time. A piranha could not survive lower temperatures in the lake during a winter in Indiana.

Lang said that although a piranha, or a shoal of piranha, would not have a major negative impact on a lake, there are plenty of species of fish and plants that could do some serious damage to a local ecosystem.

“This piranha might not be a big deal,” said Lang. “But under different circumstances, with a different plant or animal, it is a big deal.”

As for the piranha caught by Seibert, it was kept alive in a bucket for a while before it was taken to the DNR and frozen.

It was later returned to Seibert and his father, who say they plan to try to have the fish preserved and mounted.

“We've caught some big (catfish) and stuff like that,” said Shaun's father, James Seibert. “But we have never caught a piranha.”