Don’t Feed Hot Dogs to Your Piranhas

A lessen to be learned by all:

No matter the species, all animals can be picky when it comes to feeding time. If you’re not familiar with your pet’s palate, educate yourself. Seriously.

For example … most folks assume piranhas eat anything. They don’t. My older brother went through a weird phase where he thought he wanted to keep fish. Instead, he filled his fish tank with piranhas. Then he filled his gas tank and took off for the weekend, leaving my father and I to school-sit.

This is now the story starts out. First off… I’ve never kept piranhas but I would imagine that you just can’t feed them anything. Also, I don’t think that wanting to keep a fish tank is a “weird phase”, but that’s just me.

The story gets interesting when the temporary caretakers feed the piranhas hot dogs for dinner:

I was given the chore of dumping the nuggets (from a safe distance, mind you) into the tank. The water seemed to come to a boil as the fish were whipped into a frankfurter frenzy. Confident that the carnivores’ appetite soon would be sated, I left them to their own devices … a decision I would live to regret.

The next day, while making my aquatic rounds, I was horrified to find a tank full of dead piranha, bellies up, bobbing among the flotsam and jetsam of half-masticated meat. I froze in disbelief at the crime scene. I thought EVERYONE liked Oscar Meyer. And of all creatures, it seemed that piranha would have no problem digesting dogs.

Whoops.

I guess I’m not really sure myself what would have killed the pirahna’s… it could have been poor water quality due to the fact that there was tons of extra food (with probably weird chemical preservatives) in the aquarium.

I’m not so sure that eating the dogs is what killed the piranhas, it very well could have been a negative effect on water quality.

Interesting. Learn from this and don’t feed your piranhas (or any fish) a ton of hot dogs. I don’t think a bunch of hot dogs is even good for people, for that matter, hehe.