![]() Easily customize your measurements and reports with Ocean Next™ software. See specifications for further information. Measures kVp, Time, HVL, Total Filtration, Dose, Dose rate, presents Waveform, and much more. Presents all parameters instantly and simultaneously for Rad/Fluoro, CT, and Dental. The Piranha R/F X-ray QA meter is a compact solution for fast and reliable testing covering all your QA requirements. ![]() ![]() ** Cione estimated that Megapiranha weighed 73 kilograms and was 1.3 metres long, but by comparing the jaw fragments with the jaw of the black piranha, Grubich thinks it was smaller – 10 kilograms, and just 0.7 metres long.Piranha R/F All you need for advanced quality control * The paper is full of the delightfully dry language of academia: “In-vivo experiments in the field to elicit and record ecologically realistic biting behaviours for predatory species are rare, dangerous, and difficult to perform.” That is, no one wants to work with things that could take your hand off. Mega-Bites: Extreme jaw forces of livingĪnd extinct piranhas (Serrasalmidae). Reference: Grubich, Huskey, Crofts, Orti & Porto. Of course, we can’t conclude that it did until we find fossils with the right tooth marks. So we know that Megapiranha could have eaten such foods. The replica, which had the same strength and hardness as a piranha’s jaw, was strong enough to cause “catastrophic punctures” in a cow’s femur, a turtle’s shell, and an armoured catfish’s scales. Grubich even checked that it could do so by creating a metal-alloy replica of the fossilised jaw and testing it. But rather than crunching through hard nuts, as pacus do today, Grubich thinks that it used its slice-and-crush teeth to break into the bones of its prey, or through the defences of turtles and armoured fish. What did Megapiranha actually do with such a strong bite? As I mentioned, the shape of its teeth suggests that it could crush hard food and slice soft flesh. That’s at least four times more force than the largest black piranha. By extrapolating from his living fish to the larger Megapiranha **, he estimated that the prehistoric giant could have bitten with a force of 1,240 to 4,749 Newtons (279 to 1,068 pounds). The black piranhas that Grubich collected varied in length from 20 to 37 centimetres long, and even a small increase in size translated to a huge increase in bite strength. Combine this with aggressive biting tactics, and “it should come as no surprise that black piranha, whether large or small, can rapidly and efficiently excise large chunks out of their prey,” says Grubich.īut Megapiranha was even more efficient. These take up virtually the entire space behind the fish’s eye and mouth (labelled AM and A1 in the diagram), and make up 2 percent of its weight! They also attach to a point far up the lower jaw, allowing the fish to transmit as much of the muscle’s force as possible into the tip of its jaws. Its secret is a huge group of jaw-closing muscles. And one species, called the wimple piranha, feeds only on fish scales. Many are vegetarians-they’re known as pacu. Only some of them are flesh-eaters like the famous red-bellied species. The piranha family are known as serrasalmids, a word that, delightfully, means “serrated salmon”. Pound for pound, they chomp down with more force than bigger icons like the Megalodon, the whale-killing monster shark. Now Justin Grubich from American University in Cairo has found that Megapiranha and its modern relatives have some of the strongest bites of any fish, relative to their size. At around 71 centimetres long, it wasn’t big enough to attack a chopper, but it was still three times the size of its modern meat-eating cousins. It’s all rather silly, but if you look on Wikipedia’s entry for the film, you’ll see these words at the top: “For the prehistoric creature, see Megapiranha.” One of them leaps out of the water and bites a helicopter. There’s a terrible B-movie from 2010 called Megapiranha, about giant, genetically modified piranhas that wreak havoc upon Floridian tourists.
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