Chinese piranha attack leads to fish hunt

A city in China is biting back after a resident complained that piranhas in the river had attacked him – offering a reward of 1,000 yuan (£100 or $150) to anyone who catches one of the predators. Zhang Kaibo, from Liuzhou in the south-west Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, said he needed stitches in his hand after three of the fish attacked him as he washed his dog in the river. He managed to grab one, but it died shortly after he took it home.



"Later on, my mum cut it into pieces and we planned to eat it. [But] some local officials came to my home and collected it to study," he said. Officials confirmed that the specimen was a sharp-snouted piranha, which, like all piranhas, is native to South America and rather less common in Guangxi Zhuang. "There are far fewer people swimming in the Liu river than usual, but some people are not worried about piranhas at all. They're still enjoying swimming," Zhang said.

Zhou Quan, a spokesman for Liuzhou government, said: "Residents in this city have no need to worry about piranhas in the Liu river." He added that the fish could not kill humans and could not live in water colder than 15C – giving them little hope of surviving and reproducing. Authorities nonetheless trawled the river with a vast meat-baited net, but failed to find the piranhas among the 10kg of fish they caught. They hope the 1,000 yuan bounty will spur amateur fishermen into action.


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"I assume these piranhas were dumped into the river by a tropical fish keeper, as this species can hardly survive naturally in the Liu river where water temperatures fall below what these fish require," Li Xinhui, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, said. But other experts warned that the piranhas had no natural predators in China. "There have been cases of piranhas recorded in parts of the US and other countries [outside South America], so it's not a one-off," said Dr David Morgan, an expert on freshwater fish at Murdoch University in Australia. "It's bad news if you introduce non-native species into a new area because you may never get rid of them."