About eight to ten inches long, the red piranha (pygocentrus nattereri) enjoys fish and small mammals, and in the wild travels in schools of up to a thousand. The ones in Woodland Park Zoos Tropical Rain Forest exhibit get fed three times a week, and the Friday morning feeding is public (right between the 11 a.m. penguin breakfast and the 11:30 ocelot lunchyou can make a morning of it). Theyre not as bloodthirsty as most people think, says zoo employee Edgar Fortune; they wont attack unless theyre hungry. In fact, waiting around for their feeding, they looked rather benign and sluggish, like grumpy sunfish. But when a bucket of tiny rainbow trout was dumped into their tank, the hunt was on. Their meal wasnt the churning scarlet carnage I was expecting (OK, I admit ithoping for): just a sudden dart, a flash of bubbles, and the trout vanished. There was something very gladiatorial about it allwe were decadent Romans rooting for the lions, but also cheering whenever an adroit yet ultimately doomed Christian swam deftly out of a piranhas reach.
Fridays, 11:15 a.m. Starts: Jan. 4. Continues through Jan. 31, 2008
