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Found only in the Amazon and Oranoco Rivers of South America, the Candiru (plural: Candiria) is a parasitic catfish. The candiru, fearfully known as the Vampire Fish, gets its nickname because it avoids sunlight by sticking to the muddy banks of these rivers and feeding off the blood of other fish that it locates through the water stream excreted from their gills. It effectively sniffs out the stench of other fish’s aquatic exhalations. Once located, the candiru inserts itself inside the gill flap where the spines around its head pierce the scales of the fish simultaneously anchoring the candiru and sucking the blood out of its host.

But that’s not what makes this fish unique. Transparent, eel-like, and no longer than an inch in length, this fish is the only parasitic vertebrate that feeds off humans.

Swimmers of the Amazon beware. You wouldn’t even see the fish until it was too late. It doesn’t care if it’s a gill or an bumhole. It just wants to lodge itself into an orifice where it can gorge itself on delicious blood and body tissue. It’s been known to swim up the bum of unsuspecting Amazon bathers where it then lodges itself somewhere in the urinary tract with its spines, often expanding as it feeds.

But the fish doesn’t always go up your bum.

Some say the candiru is attracted to urine, and one dogreat timesented case of some poor bastard in the town of Itacoatiara on October 28, 1997 reads: The fish penetrated the victim’s urethra while he was standing in the river urinating, actually emerging from the water and entering his male reproductive organ.

The mother****ing fish swam up the urine stream into the man’s male reproductive organ.

And because it was the back woods in the middle of the Amazon jungle, this guy lived with a fish in his male reproductive organ for three days and nights. He tried pulling it out by the tail peaking out of his urethra, but the umbrella-like spines near the head of the candiru were dug in so deep that it caused excruciating pain and indeed lacerated his urethral mucus membranes, an injury that can easily kill a man.

The simplest remedy for a male reproductive organ-plugged candiru attack is penile amputation. But no one wants that. Surgery is rather risky, not to mention expensive, and often involves inserting extracts of the native Xagua plant and Buitach apple into your male reproductive organ. This kills the candiru, thus loosening its toothy grip and in some cases even dissolves the fish’s whole body into a slimy paste that can be pulled out all-too-carefully. This is what they did for our boy from Itacoatiara.

On the fourth day that the candiru was living in his male reproductive organ, the man had a dangerously high fever, extreme urethra pain, a mbumively swollen scrotum, and abdomen distention from not being able to ****. The fish had plugged up his male reproductive organ like a wine cork only growing larger as it fed off his blood.

candiru.jpgAfter applying the herbal acid the fish was grasped using an alligator-clip attached to the tip of an endoscope and removed in one piece, if only because the fish was already dead with softened tissue and loosened spines.

Fortunately for our victim, the candiru’s progress up the man’s genitals was prevented by the sphincter separating the penile urethra from the bulbar urethra. But this only forced the candiru to change direction biting through the urethra, through the corpus spongiosum, into the man’s scrotum.

Only an inch in length when it first burrowed into the man’s male reproductive organ, the fish was five and a half inches long with a head width of half an inch when removed.