Beware the Candiru Menace
from the very-scary-fish dept.
Not exactly news, maybe, but news to me. I was reading a cool book about the schizophrenic doctor who helped create the Oxford English Dictionary (The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester), and there’s this wacky digression about the candiru, a South American fish that allegedly will follow a stream of urine through the waters of the Amazon to embed itself, via backward-pointing spines, in your urethra (ouch!). So I’m describing this to my wife, and she starts making fun of me for being such a sap as to believe such an obviously mythical story. So I turn to Google, and low and behold, the story is true. Or at least, true enough to take in the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the normally quite skeptical folks at alt.folklore.urban. The candiru has inspired any number of web sites, including some with detailed descriptions and actual photos of the little monster. And the deeper I dug into the Google links, the wackier it got: there’s candiru poetry, more candiru poetry, and a metal band named after the fish. So what was it, exactly, that we used to do for fun before we had the Web?
December 13th, 2002 at 11:33 am
This is extremely interesting as the same experience happened to me as I tried to explain to my boyfriend about this fish…eek.
January 25th, 2003 at 1:52 am
Actually, I prefer the band Candiria (which is a school of Candiru) to Candiru, but both are worth checking out.
August 8th, 2003 at 2:14 pm
I had the exact same problem: trying to convince skeptical friends. Google helped me to convince them. And now my buddies have a new fish phobia.
April 14th, 2004 at 11:22 am
This site is gay!!!!!!!
December 1st, 2004 at 12:06 pm
Candiru for Life!!!