Blake Hall
According to Arkansas state officials, the fish that a local man caught in Lake Bentonville last Friday is indeed one of those ever-ravenous, psycho meat-obsessive fish known as a Piranha — an animal indigenous to the Amazon River in South America, more than 4,000 miles away.
Roger Headley was the guy who caught it. He said, at first, he thought it was a perch. Until he attempted to unhook it.
“When I went to take the hook out, he opened up his mouth and tried to bite me,” Roger Headley said in the video above from KNWA Fox 24. “I about messed my pants.”
The same KNWA Fox 24 also reported that a biologist from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission came to the lake soon after Headley caught it — which is where the confirmation came from.
Experts think it was a pet that got too troublesome to manage, and was recently released into the body of water.
Alan Bland, an Army Corps engineer, told KNWA Fox 24 that due to this environment which is wholly unnatural to the fish, Piranha’s usually don’t pose a threat to anyone when they’re swimming in North American waters and will appear sluggish and slow.
They’re expected to live only a few days in these conditions.
A spokesman for the state’s gaming commission referenced this story from 2003, when a fisherman caught an octopus in an Arkansas lake.