Nature’s Terrifying Truths: Penis Fish

Look, I can’t write about this story for very long. Just reading the original article has already put me in a state of clammy shock, so don’t ask me to go through all the details again. Suffice it to say that if you’re a 14-year-old Indian boy and you’re cleaning out your aquarium, you might not want to hold your precious 2cm-long fish while you take a pee. Because, you know, there’s a hole down there. And when that fish needs to find a place to hide… I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m never going to swim in a natural body of water again. Or at the very least, I’m not going to read a story with the headline “Fish found in boy’s penis”. I mean, the headline is bad enough. I didn’t need to know that it’s not even accurate—that the fish was actually found in the boy’s bladder and had to be removed by ramming a set of forceps down his urethra. And I really didn’t need to know that the fish was too slippery to catch with forceps, so they had to use a ureteroscope with a bladder stone-grabbing attachment. And you don’t need to know these things either, so don’t read the rest of the story here.