Odd this day
Content warning: bit nasty
Today is the 27th anniversary of a young Brazilian man seeking medical attention because he’d got one of those pesky fish in the Amazon that swim up your stream of urine and embed their spines in your urethra… er, stuck up his urethra. He finally provided proof, in the late 20th century, that the legends about the beastly little candirú, largely collected in the less scientifically rigorous 19th century, were true. Completely and utterly true. Well…
To begin with, there’s only one source for that date. The Straight Dope reported in 2001 that Dr Paulo Petry, now Senior Freshwater Scientist at The Nature Conservancy, had been working in Manaus when he heard about
Anoar Samad, a urogenital surgeon who’d performed the world’s first confirmed removal of a candirú from a human penis
Apparently, Petry got in touch, and the two men — with a co-author, fish physiologist Stephen Spotte — began writing an article for a proper, actual scientific journal about it. The wording certainly looks as though it may have been written for an academic publication:
On 28 October 1997, one of us (Samad) attended a 23-year-old man from the town of Itacoatiara on the Amazon River who sought medical attention with obstruction of the urethra, having been attacked by a candiru … the patient presented with fever, intense pain, scrotal edema [swelling of the scrotum], and extreme abdomen distention from urine retention. Surgical removal of the fish was considered, but…
Well, basically, they anesthetised the poor bastard, shoved a little camera up his pink oboe, grabbed the fish with an attachment and yanked it out.
Fortunately the fish was dead, and decay was beginning to soften its tissues. Tension on the spines had relaxed in death, and they no longer gripped. Had the candirú been alive, its removal would have been more difficult and resulted in greater trauma to the patient. The fish penetrated the victim’s urethra while he was standing in the river urinating, actually emerging from the water and entering his penis, filling the entire anterior urethra. He reported trying to grab hold of the fish, but it was very slippery, and it forced its way inside with alarming speed. The candirú’s forward progress was blocked by the sphincter separating the penile urethra from the bulbar urethra. With the passage blocked, the fish had made a lateral turn and bitten through the tissue into the corpus spongiosum, creating an opening into the scrotum.
The fish was 13.4cm long, and its head was 1.15cm wide, which makes the final sentence of the abstract initially unsurprising:
Although the patient suffered immediate trauma…
…and then, surprising:
no long term effects of the attack were noticed 1 year after the incident.
But the real problems (for those of us reading this, apart from the body horror) arise when we begin to seek out this publication. Can it be found? Can it bollocks. There is a paper in Environmental Biology of Fishes vol.60 in 2001, written by Stephen Spotte, Paulo Petry and one Jansen A.S. Zuanon (of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas de Amazônia), but it is titled:
Experiments on the feeding behavior of the hematophagous candiru
It says, in passing:
Urine is believed to attract hematophagous candirus as a prelude to their occasional attacks on human beings
…but concludes that candirú
did not respond to potential chemical attractants
That is, they were tested with urine and didn’t show any interest in it. So, where is the paper co-written with Dr Samad? There’s a 2013 paper from the Journal of Travel Medicine, ‘Candiru — A Little Fish With Bad Habits: Need Travel Health Professionals Worry? A Review’, which refers to the incident, but with clear scepticism:
…there is a tendency to cling to the one much publicized case from Brazil where in 1997 an extraction of a candiru is said to have been performed. Unfortunately, there are too many inconsistencies and irregularities attached to this case to rely on it with confidence, such as the victim’s insistence that the fish jumped out of the water and ascended the urine column.
The reference at the bottom of that paper takes you to a page on Dr. Samad’s website which is now only available on the Wayback Machine, which basically tells us what we know so far, and throws in one extra detail:
We considered opening the perineum and removing it through this route
…which sounds uninviting, to put it mildly.
Mind you, this old h2g2 page quotes “fish expert Barry Chernoff” who
says that lodged candiru fish have been known to ‘actually chew their way into the testicles’. He describes surgery thus: ‘the person has to be sliced open and sewn back up with the hope that everything works’.
There is such a fish expert, and I don’t want to suggest that I know more than a professor of earth and environmental sciences, but… the evidence (from another expert) does not support this. In 2002, Stephen Spotte published an entire 322-page book about the little blighter: Candiru: Life and legend of the bloodsucking catfishes, which apparently devotes an entire three chapters to the 1997 story. (I say apparently because archive.org, as you may know, is down at time of writing, partly because it has so much copyrighted material on it, of which I suspect Spotte’s book is an example, being so recent. Also, Spotte’s work is not in the library of the university where I work.)
Anyway, to get back to the story and its source, Wikipedia says:
Samad gave him [Petry] photos, the original VHS tape of the cystoscopy procedure, and the actual fish’s body preserved in formalin as his donation to the National Institute of Amazonian Research.
…and adds that the book points out that swimming up a stream of urine into a urethra
has been known conclusively to be a myth for more than a century, as it is impossible because of simple fluid physics.
In other words: that’s upstream, and this isn’t an Atlantic salmon leaping waterfalls to return to its breeding grounds. Also, even if the urethra is dilated because you’ve been putting it off for too long and are now pissing like a horse, this fish’s head is over a centimetre wide. It’s not getting in there, and even if it tries, you’re going to see the little bastard coming. I suspect the Straight Dope report either jumped the gun or didn’t get its facts right, and that the scientists investigated Dr. Samad’s case and… were not altogether convinced.
Plenty of people who should know better have bought this kind of tale, though — even those writing within the last century, during which we have apparently known it was a myth. One Eugene Willis Gudger, for example, wrote two articles for the American Journal of Surgery in 1930, in which — while expressing some scepticism — he recounted the narratives of eight men, including such phrases as:
…with great violence it forces its way in and desiring to eat the flesh…
…has the habit of entering with great impetuosity and rapidity into the external openings of the human body…
…entered the urethra and rectum, chiefly if one while in the water should satisfy nature…
…little animal launches itself out of the water and penetrates the urethra by ascending the length of the liquid column…
…penetrates with eel-like nimbleness into the orifices of bathers and causes many fatal accidents…
…horrible sufferings which the introduction of this living needle may occasion
…and says
local people were said to have used tight strings around the penis to avoid entry
This is all quoted in the Journal of Travel Medicine article linked to above, which re-examines the stories and concludes: they’re all the same one being recycled. Quite apart from anything else, what the candirú really does when it’s feeling peckish is insert itself into the gills of other fish in order to feed on them. It needs to be in fresh water to keep breathing while it does that — which it won’t find much of lodged up a human aperture.
Basically, the legend isn’t even legend, but balls, but is far too entertaining to let go of. A fish? That swims up your cock? And sticks its spines out? Hilarious! And it’s not just silly websites and stocking filler books that repeat it. As well as William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, it turns up in Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters — although we’ll allow that, as it’s told by an unreliable narrator in a supposed filming diary and passed on as local legend, and, of course, both are works of fiction, after all.
The year after Spotte’s book which debunks the legend, however, a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society of Literature, Redmond O’Hanlon, published Trawler, in which he claims that the candirú
will swim excitedly up your stream of uric acid, enter your urethra like a worm into its burrow, and stick out its retrorse spines. Nothing can be done. The pain is spectacular. You must go to a hospital before your bladder bursts; you must ask a surgeon to cut off your penis.
He can be seen in this video demonstrating a device fashioned from a cricket box and a tea strainer which would provide apparently foolproof protection, were it not for the fact that they promptly just swim up your arse instead.
I suspect O’Hanlon has his tongue in his cheek somewhat — and I also think he’s the person from whom Julian Barnes (directly or indirectly) got the legend. O’Hanlon wrote a piece called ‘Amazon Adventure’ for Granta 20 in 1986, and had previously taken James Fenton with him to Borneo for a piece in Granta 10 in 1983. Barnes’ History of the World… came out in 1989, and he’s known Fenton since their days together at the New Statesman in the 1970s.
All in all, then, it’s a… colourful fable, let’s say, or — as Spotte put it when interviewed him for 2008 book Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures, your chances of being attacked up the old chap by a spiny fish are
About the same as being struck by lightning while simultaneously being eaten by a shark.
