Douglas F. Hoffman, age 9, of Sarasota, Fla., for his question;

Is the piranha a real fish?

Once in a while, we like to scare ourselves with a ghastly story. We hear about monstrous sea serpents and man eating sharks   and shake in our shoes. Some of these terrifying creatures do not exist. They were made up from the imagination of soma story teller. But some of these monsters are real and just as scary as anything we could possibly imagine.
The piranha, sad to say, is a real fish. He is one of the most dangerous animals in the world. But he is only a small monster, less than a foot long. Whatts more, we are not likely to meet him. His home i s far away, south of the equator.

How can such a small fish be more dangerous, say, than a .... man eating shark? By himself, he is not so very dangerous. But the little tyrant is a gangster. He attacks only with a large gang of his bloodthirsty relatives. And a gang of piranha fish are deadly dangerous.

They haunt many of the big rivers of South America   the mighty Amazon and some of its tributaries. They lay in wait for careless swimmers in Paraguay and Uragu ay, in Brazil and in northern Argentina. A horse, a pig, a whopping fish   no living victim is too big for a gang of piranha fish to tackle.
Each little monster wears a furious, bulldog expression, He is a flatfish fish with a butting lower jaw held in place by mighty muscles. His two rows of razor sharp teeth are shaped like triangles. When the haws are closed, these dagger teeth interlock and fit tightly together. He can take a clean bite about the size of an olive and the wretched little creature likes to bite living flesh.
The true story of the fate of a poor pig who happens to fall into piranha infested water is more grisly than any made up story. The gang of little monsters pounces without warning. Each grabs himself a bite of live pork and swallows it whole. One after another, the gang members flash back again and again. In five or ten minutes all the meat is gone and there is nothing left of the pig but his bones. Mostly, they eat fishes and reptiles and sometimes they capture a water bird. Naturally, no human being would dare to go swimming in piranha infestad water.
The flat piranha, with his bulldog face, is almost as round as a plate. He is silvery blue marked with traces of vivid red. Piranha eggs, we think, are stuck to water weeds or placed in hollows in the river bed. The parents guard their eggs as fiercely as they attack their victims.