Not a Piranha

It was a Pacu:

• Lorenzo Pious was fishing with a night crawler at Washington Park lagoon Thursday afternoon when he caught a surprise -- what looked like a piranha.

  [...] But after Pious took it to Henry's Sports, Bait & Marine on South Canal, the 16-inch fish weighing 2½ pounds was identified as a pacu.

  "It is definitely a black pacu," said Jason Duracka of Animal Island in Midlothian. "You can tell by the configuration. It is a common fish in the pet trade ,and they grow very large, very quickly. They are often mistaken for piranhas. They are the same family as a piranha, but they don't have the same attitude."

We recall more than a few stories about someone who released piranha in the Humbolt Park lagoons in the hopes of starting a breeding population there around the time of the riots. We don't think the experiment was very successful, but it makes for one of the funnier fish stories swapped over cold beers non-alcoholic fruity beverages.