Pacus gained a reputation as "testicle eating fish" after Jeremy Wade featured them on a 2011 episode of his Animal Planet
show "River Monsters." Wade said Amazonian locals told him two men died after they had their testicles bitten off by a fish.
British
tabloids picked up the
story and it became an Internet sensation.
"I had heard of a couple of fishermen in Papua, New Guinea, who had been castrated by something in the water,"
Wade said at the time. "The bleeding was so severe that they died. The locals told me that this thing was like a human in the water, biting at the testicles of fishermen. They didn’t know what it was."
Despite the sort of nickname that would make any man cross his legs in fear, pacus aren't much of a threat. They are in the same family of fish as the piranha, but they mostly eat plants, supplementing their diet with smaller fish at times,
according to the Carroll County News.
They have considerable jaw power, strong enough to crack open tree nuts that fall into the water. But let's not confuse those kind of nuts with other sorts of nuts.
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