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This one certainly falls in the "bites" category:
Four people are found dead and covered in bites after
spate of terrifying PIRANHA attacks in Paraguay
WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: Bodies of four people found mauled by piranhas
By STEWART CARR FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 13:25 EST, 6 January 2022
The bodies of four swimmers have been found mauled by piranhas in a spate of attacks that has sent shockwaves throughout South America.
The attacks happened in Paraguay, where people have visited local rivers in large numbers during the current heatwave in order to cool down.
The first death of the New Year happened on Sunday when a 22-year-old man was bathing in the Paraguay River.
The alarm was raised when he suddenly vanished, and when his body was eventually found 45 minutes later, several parts had been torn off and eaten by the piranhas.
The second attack also happened on the Paraguay River when a 49-year-old man was found dead after being attacked by piranhas.
He had been reported missing hours earlier, and he was also found with severe bites to the face. In this case, however, it is believed the man died from a heart attack and only then was he attacked by the piranhas.
The Paraguay River is one of the biggest in the country, in the Ita Enramada neighbourhood, just south of the capital Asuncion.
Two other people were found dead with piranha bites on their bodies in the Tebicuary river on Sunday.
There have been further alleged attacks, which were not fatal but resulted in serious injuries, on the Parana River at the Bella Vista Fishing Club, which is in the department of Itapua.
The attacks follow on from other incidents reported in Argentina recently, including a teenage girl who had a toe bitten off.
Local TV reports showed images of medics treating wounds sustained by the bathers to their hands and feet.
This victim was lucky not to lose a toe.
This individual had a chunk bitten out of one of their fingers by the piranhas during the attack
According to local media, such attacks occur during hot weather. They are more common during the summer when the fish reproduce and come close to the coast when water levels are low.
After the latest attacks that left 20 injured and at least two people dead, Argentinian biologist Julio Caply revealed that although there are eight species of piranhas in the country, the attacks are usually made by only two - serrasalmus marginatus and serrasalmus maculatus.
The biologist said that the killer fish are mainly present in the Parana and Paraguay rivers, saying that they tend to hide under floating plants before suddenly rushing out to attack victims.
Locals have now been warned to avoid bathing in the rivers during breeding season, in particular areas with floating plants - where piranhas may be guarding their eggs and offspring.
In another incident, a man had his big toe bitten off again in a piranha attack on the Parana River, on this occasion as it followed its course through the small city of Coronda in the east-central Argentinian province of Santa Fe.
The man had the tip bitten off his big toe and his son had a chunk torn from the heel of his foot, both leaving gaping wounds.
Goldfish learn how to drive
Six fish were able to navigate a room in search of targets with ‘high level of success’
Israeli scientists have built a “Fish Operated Vehicle” (FOV) and claim to have trained six goldfish to move it around. They say the experiment demonstrates how navigational skills can translate between different environments.
The study, published this month in the Behavioural Brain Research journal, involved putting the fish into a water tank attached to a wheeled robot that was hooked up to a motion-tracking camera. A computer program developed to respond to its movement towards the tank’s walls then moved the FOV into the respective direction.
Researchers from Ben-Gurion University found that the goldfish managed to maneuver the vehicle around a three-by-four meter room in search of a marked destination in return for a food pellet reward. They gradually improved, “all while avoiding dead-ends and correcting location inaccuracies,” the team wrote.
The fish were able to complete the same task when starting the FOV from different points in the room, or when the target was moved, or even when decoys were set up. While the trials lasted 30 minutes each, some of the fish ended up finding their targets in under a minute as the experiment progressed.
The team recorded the number of times the fish got to their targets, how long it took them and the distance traveled. By the last session, the fish had “exhibited control of the FOV and a high level of success.”
The results suggest that “navigational ability is universal rather than specific to the environment,” the researchers said, adding that it supports the hypothesis that space representation and navigation skills “possess a universal quality” across species.
“The way space is represented in the fish brain and the strategies it uses may be as successful in a terrestrial environment as they are in an aquatic one,” the team noted, adding that goldfish may have the “cognitive ability to learn a complex task in an environment completely unlike the one they evolved in.”
The team posted videos of the experiment and shared instructions to build mobile fish tanks on GitHub. In 2014, a team of Dutch computer scientists designed a similar goldfish-at-the-wheel apparatus that was apparently intended to “liberate fish all over the world.”
Mafia boss caught after 20 years following Google Maps blunder
Italian police have credited the app with capturing a photo of a crime group leader
who’d been in hiding since 2002
Anti-Mafia authorities in Italy have credited a Google Street View picture for revealing the location of a member of Sicily’s Stidda Mafia group who escaped a Rome prison in 2002 partway through a life sentence for murder.
Gioacchino Gammino was convicted of murder and other Mafia-related crimes in 1998, and had been on Italy’s list of most wanted criminals. He escaped prison three years later, during the making of a film. He was detained in the town of Galapagar, near the Spanish capital of Madrid, where he had been living, working as a chef, and running a greengrocers’ shop, having assumed the name Manuel.
Police in Sicily had been searching for the 61-year-old for several years, and a European arrest warrant had been issued in 2014. However, it was a Google Street View image that ultimately allowed authorities to discover his specific location.
The tech company’s navigation tool caught an image of two men chatting outside El Huerto de Manu – Manu’s Garden, the shop ‘Manuel’ owned – and officers noted that one of the individuals looked a lot like Gammino. The Mafia boss was further identified by the scar on the left side of his chin that was evident in a photo on a local restaurant’s Facebook page.
Although Gammino was detained on December 17, his arrest was not made public until it was reported by Italy’s La Repubblica daily on Wednesday.
“There were many previous and long investigations which led us to Spain. We were on a good path, with Google Maps helping to confirm our investigations,” Palermo prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi told the Italian media.
According to local reports, following his arrest, the gangster – who apparently thought he’d successfully cut all ties with his past – asked the authorities, “How did you find me? I haven’t even called my family for 10 years!”
Gammino is currently in Spanish custody, with Italian police hoping to extradite him to face his sentence by the end of February.
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