A reel-y sharp turn of events.
A Pennsylvania boy expected to catch a bass when fishing with his father on Saturday — but he hooked a razor-toothed red belly piranha instead.
“At this point you can’t put anything past Seamus,” wrote the boy’s father, Michael Coffey, on Facebook.
“Today he caught a 2lb red belly piranha out of the Ridley Park Lake! Of all things.”
The Delaware County duo were casually casting a line when Seamus felt a bite.
Michael, assuming that it was a simple bass, told Seamus to pull in the fish slowly to prevent it from getting away.
But when Seamus hoisted the creature out of the water, Michael was perplexed, at first thinking it could be an oddly large bluegill or a similar fish.
“I was like, ‘Oh, this is a bluegill, I don’t know what this is,’” Michael told 6ABC.
Seamus immediately identified the apex predator.
“And he said, ‘It’s a piranha!’”
His son’s sharp eye for wildlife comes from educational wildlife content he watches online.
“He knew it was a piranha from his educational fishing videos he watches all over the world,” Michael added.
The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission confirmed that the fish was indeed a piranha, which are native to South America.
While catching a piranha in local waters sounds bizarre, incidents involving non-native species are not unheard of, according to Mike Parker, Communications Director for the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.
“So, it’s a little bit more common than we wish,” Parker told The Post.
“A few times each summer we get reports of something strange like this type of fish, an alligator, a caiman… some sort of exotic snake, reptile, or in this case, a fish.”
Parker noted that while Pennsylvania has strict protections for its native species, state law does not prohibit residents from owning exotic pets — though releasing them into public waterways is illegal.
“The most likely scenario is that it was an unwanted pet that someone decided to release, essentially making it someone else’s problem,” Parker explained.
Other pathways for exotic species entering local ecosystems include live seafood trade escapes or cultural release ceremonies.
Had young Seamus not reeled in the piranha, Parker believes the fish likely would have survived the summer due to its adaptability, but it would not have survived the winter once water temperatures dropped.
Beyond the immediate surprise factor, releasing non-native animals poses real ecological risks.
“When you do introduce something non-native, especially a predator, it can be disruptive to the native ecosystem,” Parker said, emphasizing that introduced pets can also spread non-native diseases to local wildlife.
