Veggie Lauren Treacy got her own back on a piranha that nearly bit her finger off – by putting aside her diet rules and eating it.
Student Lauren, 20, caught the razor-toothed creature while fishing at Lake Titicaca on the Peru-Bolivia border.
She said: “I caught about 10 small fish and kept throwing them back before I landed the big one. I didn’t realise what it was at first and in my excitement I went to get hold of it and it just bit me.”
Lauren told the Sunday People she was on a three-month trip teaching English, when she had sailed out with pals and was three hours from shore when she got a nibble.
But after it was reeled in it clamped its jaws on her finger and nearly ripped it off.
She said: “It was painful. Flesh was hanging off my finger, there was a lot of blood and we were all in shock. I couldn’t believe it when I realised what it was.”
But Lauren, studying archeology and history at Bangor, later tucked into her fish supper washed down with local booze.
She said: “I’d been through so much to catch the piranha I felt I should bite back. I remember the taste was pretty bland, though, and I was very disappointed.”
Lauren wrapped her wound with a makeshift loo-roll bandage but two days later she was in agony and had to endure an 18-hour coach ride to hospital.
“Doctors were shocked I didn’t come straight away,” she recalled. “There was a lot of infection because of how long I’d left it so I was given antibiotics.”
She was on a drip for four days as medics successfully battled to save her finger.
Lauren, now home in Oldham, has been left with a reminder of her trip – a six-inch scar on her finger.
“I’ve named it Bismark after our guide,” she said.
