Piranha Bites example essay topic
426 words
When you think of piranhas, you probably think about a fierce fish with razor sharp teeth. You might even think of a river that looks like its boiling with swarms of hungry fish, eating an animal all the way down to its bone in just a few minutes. I don't think you would want to get close to a piranha. But in reality, if you did, the piranha would look at you and decide that you weren't really good to eat and just leave you alone and swim away. Even the scientists who study piranhas don't agree with each other on how dangerous piranhas are to people. There is no proof that a piranha has ever killed a person. Most piranha bites happen when fishermen try to take the piranha off the hook and piranha bites them. A lot of fishermen have lost fingers and toes to piranhas this way. Piranhas live in most of South America and nowhere else in the world. The piranhas range from southern Venezuela to the northern part of Argentina.
They are found in all of the major rivers in South America that flow into the Atlantic Ocean, including the Amazon, Orinoco, Essequibo, La Plata, and Sao Francisco. They are lowland fish that live in big rivers and small streams. They also inhabit lagoon, ponds, lakes, and reservoirs. They live in fresh waters in tropical forests and tropical savannas, or grasslands. Piranhas don't live in mountain streams or mountain lakes, probably because the water is way too cold and also because the water flows too fast that they can't catch the fish living in it. The piranha's ancestors first showed up 100 million years ago.
They showed up in a fresh water lake on a continent that is now South America. They had one feature that made them different from the earlier fish before them and that's a chain of small bones called Webster's Ossicles. These are the first four vertebrae of the backbone. This allowed the fish to hear better, especially high pitched sounds. Fish that have Webster's Ossicles are classified as Ostariophysans. The Ostariophysans evolved into many different groups of fresh water fish.
One of the first was the piranha, so they were on e of the first to have good hearing. They could find food easier and can escape predators better by using their hearing. There are over 30 different species of Piranhas today.
