DETROIT (AP) - Man-eating fish invade Detroit!
OK, that’s a stretch.
But there really is a school of piranhas that’s new in town, and just getting to know a big glass tank at Detroit’s Belle Isle.
They’re the latest addition to the Belle Isle Aquarium, where these voracious South American fish actually constitute nothing like a scary headline. Instead, they’re the latest piece of good news about a cultural gem that was rescued in the last decade almost entirely by volunteers, said Fred Huebener, the site’s new general manager, and one of only three paid staff.
“We’re a success story, and we’re excited that these piranhas are the latest example of our comeback,” Huebener said Friday, while a steady stream of visitors milled past the toothy newcomers and 42 other tanks of fish.
The way that comeback happened almost sounds like, well, a fish story.
According to Free Press reports at the time, a bunch of aquarium fans first protested the city’s closure of the aging facility by walking picket lines in 2005; then fought to save the historic city-owned building with donations, despite having seen all 4,000 fish shipped away to other institutions. After promising the city they’d take good care of the facility, they finally were given control of the building - which is still owned by the City of Detroit - fixed the leaky roof, began rehabbing tanks and restocking the piscean collection, reopened to limited hours in 2012, and now have restored the building’s turn-of-the-last century interior with thousands of hours of volunteer elbow grease.
The aquarium operates entirely on grants, donor contributions, profits from a gift shop and fund-raising events, Huebener said.
“We don’t get any government support at all,” he said. The annual operating budget is about $400,000, not including capital improvements - which get paid for virtually one at a time, “as people step up and say they’d like to pay for something,” he said.
This year, the staff and volunteers filled some of the last few empty tanks with wriggling creatures that inhabit not only the Great Lakes but also great bodies of water in other parts of the world, the Detroit Free Press (https://on.freep.com/2g1LFjn ) reported.
“These are our newest residents,” Huebener called out, as a knot of visitors eyed the restless piranhas.
“Three weeks ago, they were in the Amazon River. Now they’re part of our South American wall,” a 50-foot gallery of exotic fish from south of the equator, he told the group.
Unlike most aquariums, which charge a fin and a flipper to get in, the Belle Isle Aquarium is free. That seemed to go down well with an estimated 1,000 people who came through Friday - the reopened facility’s first day of expanded hours, which now include Fridays as well as Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. each day. Unlike the Toledo Zoo’s Aquarium, which charges $17 for adults and $14 for even a 2-year-old to enter (through the zoo, that is); and unlike Sea Life Michigan at Great Lakes Crossing Outlets mall in Auburn Hills, where the tab is $23.50 for anyone 13 and up, the Belle Isle Aquarium charges nothing, depending instead on donations.
A fund-raiser was held Dec. 2, featuring Brazilian décor, Brazilian bites of food and the official reveal of the red-bellied Brazilian piranhas. The event called Bite of the Amazon, was a sly reference to these little fish with big teeth. Little - but not for long, said aquarium curator Richard Kik IV.
“These guys are small now - roughly 5 inches - but they’ll get at least a foot long, some 15 inches,” said Kik, who spent 12 years with the Detroit Zoo before the aquarium hired him. To grow, they will eat - even each other. Piranhas swim in schools, yet the dominant ones often chase others and will attack weaker members of the group, Kik said.
“They’re pretty nippy,” even when well-fed on bites of chopped fish dropped into their tank, he added. Piranha politics? These critters do not hold elections.
“If one senses it can take over, it will do that, usually by eating another,” Kik said. So, before the piranhas arrived from Brazil, aquarium workers did what they call tankscaping, arranging rocks, plants, a hollow log and other hiding spots for any fish that need them.
Even so, the school’s population quickly dropped from 30 arrivals to the 21 visible to a reporter, with perhaps two or three just then taking refuge out of sight, Kik said.
Why bring piranhas to Belle Isle? People asked for them, Kik said. There’s a fascination with their man-eating reputation, although it’s largely unearned, he said. Hollywood has pumped its usual hype and hyperbole into fish-ploitation films as 1978’s “Piranha,” in which a school of the eponymous stars escape a military experiment gone wrong, then gorge on lake-swimmers; and the 2010 remake, in which prehistoric piranhas devour people in 3D. Burp!
Still, piranhas have a bite that can seem fearsome if they’re hungry, although they generally attack dying or dead prey, according to nature websites. They were an instant hit on Belle Isle.
Visitors of all ages gaped at them and countless other slimy things, all finning in the greenish glow of tank water. Fish fanciers included 12-year-old Joey Krausmann of Grosse Pointe Park, who stood quietly at the piranha tank while his mother Kari Krausmann, 46, exclaimed: “They have very, very sharp teeth, I hear, but they don’t look so bad, seeing them like this,” and 92-year-old Jeanne Servis of Birmingham, there with her son and daughter-in-law, pondering quietly how it was that a lifetime ago she brought her young children to see this very place.
The Belle Isle Aquarium opened in 1904 but fell on hard times during the administration of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, said Steven Machlay, 55, of Detroit, a volunteer docent at the collection and one of those who in 2005 picketed to protest the city’s plan to shutter the Albert Kahn-designed building.
Now, he volunteers almost every weekend, shepherding visitors past displays he helped build, answering questions and fulfilling a lifelong love of aquariums; he once had five huge tanks at home until marriage dropped that to one, he said with a laugh. These days, he gets his tank time as a docent, he said.
“When Mayor Archer handed us the keys, this building needed a whole new roof,” a miracle achieved when volunteer leader Jennifer Boardman wrote a masterpiece of a grant application that shook loose vital foundation cash, Machlay recalled.
This fall, with much of the building restored, and with new concrete walkways as well as outdoor lighting being installed this week - thanks to some individuals donors and the William Davidson Foundation - the facility was in fine shape to host the fund-raiser, he said. Smiling, he added:
“We were entrusted with the people’s aquarium. Now we’re proud of what’s here.”
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Information from: Detroit Free Press, https://www.freep.com
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