116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Time Machine: Piranhas in Iowa
Predatory, toothy fish pulled from state rivers, lakes
The Gazette offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
Iowa Conservation Director Bruce Stiles received an unusual request from a Wisconsin fisherman in 1957.
“I fish Clear Lake each summer, and, if possible, the Upper Iowa River,” the angler wrote. “What is the Conservation Commission doing to stop importation of the South American piranha? Please keep them out of Clear Lake and the Upper Iowa River!”
Stiles assured the anxious fisherman Iowa had no plans to stock piranhas in Iowa waters.
The predatory piranha, equipped with powerful jaws and razor-sharp teeth, is most dangerous when traveling in large schools, typically in the south Pacific Ocean. A school of piranhas can strip the carcass of large animals in minutes.
From the Mississippi
Piranhas in Iowa always have been relatively rare, mostly brought in by tropical fish stores.
A Dubuque man caught a piranha cousin, a pacu, in the Mississippi River in 1980. The unusual 14-inch fish was identified by a Dubuque pet store owner. It was placed in a tank, but the stream of visitors and the glare of TV camera lights were blamed for the fish’s death six hours after it was caught.
In Cedar Lake
The next reported catch was in Cedar Lake in Cedar Rapids on, Aug. 1, 1983, when Marlon Price of Cedar Rapids hooked a red-bellied piranha. Price, who had served a tour of duty with the Navy in the South Pacific, recognized the fish when he pulled it out of the water.
“I saw some while I was in the Navy, and I’ve since seen them in pet stores,” he said. “I decided not to bother trying to take the hook out with my hand.” He used needle-nosed pliers, threw the fish into a 5-gallon bucket and hauled it to Hutton’s Tropical Fish in Marion.
A clerk there dubbed the toothy fish “Sylvester,” and placed a name tag on the tank.
The store’s owner, Georgia Windenburg, said Price at first intended to find another home for the piranha, but then his son expressed interest in keeping it.
The fish’s fate was revealed in Price’s 1998 obituary, which said, “Marlon enjoyed fishing and, much to his dismay, reeled in a piranha from Cedar Lake, which he later donated to Kennedy High School.”
Windenburg said single piranhas aren’t dangerous unless they feel trapped, then they attack in self-defense. She said a single piranha in Cedar Lake didn’t pose a threat to the public, but it could bite an unsuspecting fisherman. She also recommended that pet owners not turn tropical fish loose among native fish.
“If a store won’t take them or a friend,” she said, “kill them.” That, she said, would be much kinder to the tropical fish, which need warm water temperatures to survive.
At ISU in Ames
A few days after Sylvester was pulled from Cedar Lake, a piranha showed up in a fountain near the Iowa State University Memorial Union in Ames.
Two university employees cleaning the fountain were bitten by the fish before it was caught and put in a fish tank in the office of Union Assistant Manager Ray Patrilla.
Patrilla at first thought it was a sunfish. When he learned it was a piranha, he removed it and flushed it down a toilet.
Other catches
A 14-inch, 2-pound piranha was caught in the Cedar River near Waterloo in September 1986. It was the third time that summer that one of the tropical fish had been taken from the Cedar, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
In March 1987, two Iowa Lakes Community College students in Estherville pulled a piranha out of the Des Moines River.
“It was 16 inches long and weighed 3 1/4 pounds,” said Gary Phillips, director of the school’s Department of Environmental Studies. He said the fish must have been placed in the river recently because it would not have been able to survive the winter.
A 2-pound piranha was taken from the Des Moines River in April 1989. Two weeks later, a 4-pounder was snagged from Saylorville Lake north of Des Moines. The fish “fought harder than any 8-pound carp I’ve ever seen,” said Melvin Ringgenberg, husband of Betty, who caught the feisty fish.
A 12-inch, 1.5-pound piranha with a red belly was caught near a sandbar near the 5-in-1 Dam in downtown Cedar Rapids in August 1991 by Merle Anderson and Chris Klinghagen of Cedar Rapids, who took it to Hawkeye Seed on Third Avenue SE to identify it.
“It matched perfectly the piranhas in Hawkeye’s fish tanks,” The Gazette reported. The two men returned the fish to the Cedar River.
Dangerous?
A 1995 Gazette editorial debunked the ferocity of the dreaded piranhas caught in the Midwest over the past few years.
“Need Iowa natives fear stepping into lakes or dangling their feet in rivers? Natural resources experts say no,” The Gazette writer stated. “A piranha is no more dangerous than a bass or snapping turtle. World Book Encyclopedia corroborates that, saying that despite their sharp teeth and fearsome movie reputation, piranhas seldom attack people and usually hunt alone – not in schools.”
In July 2002, The Gazette ran an Associated Press story about four piranhas pulled from Iowa lakes.
Tim Merical of Grinnell caught one at the Jacob Krumm Nature Preserve on July 10. The next day, another piranha was pulled from the same lake. One was caught at Rock Creek Lake on July 8. Another was found at Saylorville Lake near Des Moines the previous week.
The survival of tropical fish in Cedar Lake was attributed to its warm water. The lake, created in the 1880s to cool the electric company’s Sixth Street power plant, was 40 degrees warmer than any other nearby body of water, keeping it mostly ice-free in winter.
With the demolition of the power plant in 2009, Cedar Lake now freezes over. So, no piranha.
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