LORAIN — When Andre Jones went fishing Friday, he expected to catch some sheepshead or white bass. He did not expect it to meet up with a piranha, called the pacu. “It looked like a cross between a bass and a piranha,” Jones said. Jones, of Lorain, and a couple friends were fishing late Friday afternoon on the east side of Lorain, beyond the dead-end of Georgia Avenue, on a patch of flat land at the Lake Erie shoreline. Using a 12-pound test line with minnows as bait, Jones said it took a few minutes to snare the fish. “We had the drag line set and waited until it got tired. Then, we pulled it in. It struck me as odd, looking at it. It was round and I noticed the row of bottom teeth like a piranha,” Jones said. “It was crazy, man. It had a massive underbite and I thought it was a piranha at first. It was the length and width of the lid of our cooler. It was silver with black fins,” said David Ramos, Jones’ brother. “A lot of pacu are caught this time of year in Lake Erie. It is absolutely no big deal,” said Phil Hillman, fish management supervisor for District 3 headquarters of the Ohio division of Fish and Wildlife in Akron. “What happens is people buy them as tropical fish until they grow too big for their aquarium. So, they toss them in the river or the lake. Technically, you can’t release any aquatic critters without written permission. But it’s no big deal. They will die when it gets cold,” Hillman said. Pacu is a term of Brazilian origin that refers to several species of South American freshwater fish related to the piranha. They are omnivorous. Both pacu and piranha have similar teeth, but piranha have razor-sharp teeth and pacu have smoother, straighter teeth, Hillman said. Pacu can grow much larger than a piranha, reaching up to 60 pounds in the wild. Jones said the pacu he caught weighed about 10 pounds and measured about 20 inches in length. Jones said he took the fish to George’s Bait and Carry Out, 5150 W. Erie Ave., Lorain, where it will remain on ice until a representative from the Ohio Fish and Wildlife Division can come down to examine it. When told his fish came from someone’s aquarium, Jones laughed. “That must have been one big aquarium,” Jones said.
