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Hey, Brainstuff, Lauren Bologam here.

When Theodore Roosevelt went on a hunting expedition in Brazil in 1913. He got his money's worth.

Standing on the bank of the Amazon River, he watched piranhas attack a cow with shocking ferocity.

It was a scene out of a horror film, water boiling with frenzied piranhas in blood,

and after about a minute or two, a skeleton floating to the suddenly

calm surface. Roosevelt was appropriately shocked, and talked about it in his 1914 book

through the Brazilian wilderness. He wrote, They are the most ferocious fish in the world.

They will snap a finger off a hand,

incautiously trailed in the water.

They mutilate swimmers.

In every river town in Paraguay,

there are men who have been thus mutilated.

They will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast,

for blood in the water excites them to madness.

Thus, the American legend of the piranha had begun.

Hollywood picked it up from there with the 1978 horror flick Piranha, directed by cult film

aficionado Joe Dante, notably right after the smash hit Jaws came out in 1975.

When flesh-eating piranhas are accidentally released into a summer resort's rivers,

the guests become their next meal.

It was followed by 1981's Piranha II, The Spawning, which was James Cameron's directorial debut,

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