Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [90]
“There are thousands of creatures in the river that we enjoy—but only seven that enjoy us.”
It was all very humorous as Captain Mo counted off some well-known local denizens—piranhas, stingrays, electric eels, anacondas, and black caiman (a South American cousin of the alligator). There was even a giant catfish, called the piraíba, that could swallow a person whole.
Finally, Captain Mo began describing a creature I hadn’t heard of before. He was two sentences into his spiel when I noticed that the laughter in the room had stopped. In fact, the entire room had gone quiet.
The silence was broken several seconds later by the distinctive alarm call of a young North American woman: “It swims up your what?”
I was suddenly confused and I leaned in toward my friend, filmmaker Bob Adamo.
Bob was wearing a pained expression. He was also bent forward in his chair, as if he’d been punched in the gut.
“Did I just friggin’ hear that?” I whispered.
“I hate it when fish swim up my Telegraph Office,” came Bob’s strained reply.
I had heard Mo correctly.
By 2006, as I began planning a return trip to the Brazilian Amazon, I had already learned quite a bit more about the candiru (or carnero), the creature whose very mention had caused such a commotion aboard the Victoria Amazonica five years earlier. I also knew that “Telegraph Office” was Captain Mo’s unique way of referring to either human genitalia or the terminal opening of the digestive tract. In the case of the candiru, the term had been used because of the fish’s legendary penchant for swimming up the human urethral opening and lodging itself there.
There was no shortage of candiru-related horror stories either, to the point where many sources claimed that it was even more feared by locals than its higher-profile river-mate, the piranha.*141 According to some of these authors, coconut shells, pudendal coverings made of dried palm leaves or bark, and wicker baskets (which might have served double duty on trips to the market) were worn to protect the external genitalia from candiru attacks.*142 But even these simple devices could be considered advanced anticandiru technology compared to the technique first described by early-nineteenth-century explorers Carl Friedrich von Martius and Johann Baptiste von Spix:
These fishes are greatly attracted by the odor of urine. For this reason, those who dwell along the Amazon, when about to enter the stream, whose bays abound with this pest, tie a cord tightly around the prepuce and refrain from urinating.
Fortunately, as with the candiru’s fellow sanguivore, the leech, there’s a reliable and fairly comprehensive reference to this piscine vampire. In Candiru: Life and Legend of the Bloodsucking Catfishes, Stephen Spotte explores the bizarre world of these nasty creatures. Thankfully, the whole thing is done with clarity and some comic flair (i.e., it is not a textbook) and there’s a nice chunk of science in it as well.†143
Candiru belong to the Trichomycteridae, a family consisting of about two hundred species of “small to very small, slender-bodied freshwater catfish.” Trichomycterids, most of which are rather plain-looking insect eaters, belong to the much larger group, the order Siluriformes (catfish), which consists of thirty-five families and around three thousand species. The catfish, in turn, fall under the incredibly broad heading of ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii), as do most fish you can name with the exception of sharks, skates, and rays.
Within the Trichomycteridae is a small subfamily, Vandelliinae, which currently contains six genera of obligate blood feeders inhabiting the Amazon and Orinoco rivers of South America. These vandelliines are commonly referred to as candiru (which Spotte pronounces “candy-roo”). According to Dr. Spotte, “Formal descriptions of candirus have been published since 1846, but the question of how many species exist has no clear answer.” While some researchers think it’s likely to be somewhere around fifteen (half