Red bellied piranhas
My wife and I recently took a trip on the riverboat MV Amatista from the jungle city of Iquitos upriver on the Amazon to the confluence of the Marañón and Ucayali rivers. Before we left, several friends warned us not to get eaten by the piranhas, the small meat-eating fish with the reputation as a ferocious man-eater. It turns out that we ate piranhas, not the other way around.
Our brochure for the trip promised that, among other river and jungle excursions, we would be able to go swimming with Amazon pink dolphins. We also could fish for the dreaded piranha. We did both and it turns out that we swam with dolphins in roughly the same area that we fished for piranha. So, yes, in addition to swimming with dolphins (who were actually some distance away, so whether we were swimming “with’ them might be open to debate,) we were also swimming with piranha. And we didn’t get eaten. No one in our group was so much as nibbled on.
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