Wonders they say never end for Charlie Clinton, 11, who was fishing in a pond behind their house in Oklahoma recently, when he suddenly started yelling for his mother.
His mother reaching out to him, got a close look at Charlie’s alarmingly weird catch.
“Obviously being in a neighborhood pond, we’re used to just catching a few bass or catfish,” she said. “I mean, nothing with human-like teeth.”
It turned out that Charlie had landed a pacu, a fish that’s a cousin of the piranha and whose outsized teeth have long struck fear in swimmers. The pacu is a native of South America, but this one was swimming in a small pond in the Clintons’ suburb north of Oklahoma City.
“He said it put up a heck of a fight,” Janna revealed, saying her son reeled the fish in on his own. “He was the only one down there fishing and he did a great job.”
The Clintons posted a photo of the unusual fish to their neighborhood Facebook page and got in touch with a game warden. But before learning of its provenance, they returned the pacu to the water.
When asked what kind of bait Charlie used to entice the pacu to bite, his mother said, “You’re going to laugh. It was just a piece of bread.”
the game wardens believe the fish was a pet that outgrew its tank and was released into the wild.
