[Music] no this is not a video about the fictional 70s blockbuster jaws we're talking about a fish that's much much smaller than a great white shark but that's gonna bite about two times greater supposedly its teeth are so sharp that if it were to bite you you would only realize it after you saw blood but what if you were attacked by a school of these colorful fast-moving carnivores how much would you feel and how long would you last this is what if and here's what would happen if you fell into a pool full of piranhas
piranhas have been around for a really long time fossil evidence puts the piranhas ancestors in South America as far back as 25 million years ago and the modern piranhas we know and love today have been here for 1.8 million years so we've had some time to learn about these fearsome little river dwellers but how much of it is true pay attention what you're about to see might just save your life that piranhas are vicious bloodthirsty creatures that will tear you apart in minutes is largely a myth in 1914 former US President Theodore Roosevelt was on
a survey expedition in Brazil where he witnessed a group of locals tossing a dead cow into a river that they had stocked with starving piranhas the feeding frenzy that followed led Roosevelt to see piranhas as the embodiment of evil ferocity he compared their teeth and their jaws to those of sharks and claims that their preferred prey is usually much larger than themselves well the story stuck and naturally like jaws before it piranhas became a 1978 cult classic spreading several myths about fish that a lot of people still believe the real truth is that piranhas are
relatively calm fish and most of them are scavengers that feed on insects worms and plant material in the rivers where they live of the few species of piranhas that are attracted to the smell of blood well they tend to go for prey that's roughly the same size as them in fact if you fell into a pool of piranhas chances are they'd actually be scared of you piranhas aren't really interested in humans unless they are extremely hungry and the human is already dead but it's not like someone would starve a pack of piranhas and put them
in a pool just to watch them eat something at worst you might get nipped and not on a little which is scary enough but you can rest assured that there has never been a scientifically proven case of a human being killed by a piranha sorry gory b-movie lover but don't let me spoil all of fun even though you know the truth now the idea of what piranhas can do is still terrifying these fish typically grow up to 50 centimetres long they hunt in packs and have a bite force that's three times their body weight this
means that relative to its size a piranha bites harder than a great white shark harder than an American alligator harder than a t-rex and even harder than a Megalodon and while it's highly unlikely to happen if for some reason you were attacked by a school of piranhas roughly 400 of them could turn you into a skeleton in about five minutes but of course there's always a bigger fish so even if piranhas aren't something you have to worry about there's still a lot of underwater that you'll want to avoid can you imagine being swallowed whole by
a whale well that's a story for another what if
