Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Man Eaten by fish, Man eaten by cat fish
Each year, a few people were drowning or disappearing mysteriously in Huadu's Furong Reservoir. It was not until recently, when the son of a government official went swimming, in the reservoir and was drowned, that the secret was revealed.
It is a 3 meter long man-eating catfish whose head alone is 1 meter wide! After cutting up the catfish, people were surprised to find the remains of another man inside!
Swimming in the reservoir is now forbidden because it is feared another similar man-eating catfish is still lurking in the waters
According to this email forward, the very large fish shown in the attached photographs is a man-eating catfish caught in the Furong Reservoir, a large lake located in China's Huadu District. The message claims that human remains were found inside the giant fish and suggests that it, and possibly other "catfish" like it, are responsible for the "mysterious" disappearances of people in the area.
However, the claims in the message are nonsense. The photographs themselves are genuine, but they do not depict a catfish, man-eating or otherwise. Instead, they show a whale shark. Whale sharks, which are the largest living fish, are filter feeders that live in the ocean. Despite their size, whale sharks are not considered harmful to humans. A Wikipedia entry about whale sharks notes:
This species, despite its size, does not pose significant danger to humans. Whale sharks are actually quite gentle and can play with divers. Divers and snorkelers can swim with this giant fish without risk apart from unintentional blows from the shark’s large tail finThe following photographs, which are obviously part of the same series, show the whale shark being skinned and cut open to reveal the fish's entrails. They are generally left out of the prank email, presumably because the obvious lack of human remains inside the fish tend to "give the game away"
