OUCH

When Pete slapped me upside the head with yesterday’s Music Meme, he slipped a subtle, one-blink-and-you-miss-it reference to The Venture Brothers, the Cartoon Network’s snarky sendup of the Jonny Quest cartoons of the 1960’s.

“I hate passing these things along, but I don't want to break the chain and - I dunno - die of candirú infestation or something.”

Ah, the candirú, AKA the carnero catfish, Vandellia cirrhosa. And there are some that call it the Vampire Catfish.



The candirú has a fearsome reputation rivaling that of the piranha. It is known to enter, and live within, the gills of other fish, where it lives on the host’s blood...but that’s not why people dread encountering these little bastards in the Amazon, no, no.

No, the candirú, a slender little fish, reputedly is able to lodge itself in the human urethra, whence it is impossible to remove owing to its little barbed spines. Sounds like an Amazonian urban legend, but apparently there have been occasional reports of this happening, with the fish having been surgically removed from three separate victims by a U.S. Navy surgeon (reported in the Journal of Urology in 1945). Given the rarity of such reports, one could legitimately question their veracity...but isn’t it more fun to give yourself the shivers by thinking up horror stories about sliver-thin fish swimming upstream (as it were) and living happily in some poor schmuck’s bladder?

The old stories go on to state that the candirú is urinophilic, actually tracking urine streams to their source to get to the Tender Urethra Meat. A sort of Pee-Pee Homing Device. This is ridiculous enough, but the stories really wander off into Bullshit-Land when they speak of the fish swimming up a urine-stream to attack innocent urethras.

Well, Esteemed Readers, regardless of whether these stories have any truth to ’em or not, you won’t find me standing waist-deep in the waters of the Amazon, pissing or no. In fact, right now I have the powerful urge to cross my legs.