Doing Dumb Stuff With Animals Top 10 Countdown, #10: Swimming With Piranhas

The following is part of a top ten list written originally for The Times (London) by Richard Coniff from his new book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (W.W. Norton).

One morning in my mid-life crisis, when I had considered and rejected the thrill-seeking possibilities of nude skydiving or drag-racing on a mountain road in a red Corvette convertible, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to go for a swim in a tankful of hungry piranhas at feeding time. Soon after I was standing in the dark in front of the piranha tank at the Dallas Aquarium, surrounded by seven-year-olds excitedly telling one another how quickly piranhas can reduce a human being to bloody stew. One of the boys was lashing his head from side-to-side, teeth bared. Then a couple of others joined in, swarming around me. The aquarium's piranhas were bigger than I expected, some nearly a foot in length, and there were 40 of them in an area not much larger than a hot tub. They were pugnacious looking creatures with their lower jaws thrust forward, like bulldogs in silver body stockings.

It occurred to me that my employer of the moment, National Geographic Television, had inexplicably chosen to pay me through a temp agency. Then I climbed up onto the rim of the tank, where a former curator and piranha buff named David Schleser was waiting to give me a primer. In some parts of their range, he told me, piranhas are also known as capaburro. Schleser waited till we were both about neck-deep in the piranha tank, and then he added, “It means donkey castrator."