A TINIER and more voracious version of the candiru – the parasitic fish famous for finding its way into the orifices of unsuspecting bathers – has been discovered in Brazil. The fish, which does not yet have a name, seems to feed exclusively on the blood of its victims.
Wilson Costa, a biologist from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, discovered the transparent fish in the Araguaia river in the southeast of the Amazon basin. Costa says the fish is only a centimetre long, half the size of any of the three known species of candiru.
The fish has two hook-shaped teeth at the back of its mouth and an unusually flexible jawbone. At night, it lodges itself in the orifices of larger animals, usually the gills of other fish, buries its teeth in their flesh and sucks out blood.
“We picked out one fish in the morning and it was full of them, so full of blood they were hardly able to move,” says Costa. He says the candiru also slips inside human orifices where it is impossible to shake it out because of the powerful grip of its teeth. “Because most of the local people come from simple riverside communities, with little or no medical facilities, it can lead to serious infections,” says Costa.
On one occasion, he says, one of the tiny candiru slipped into a cut on a researcher’s hand and could be seen wriggling under the skin towards a vein.