During December 1999 Dr Peter Henderson worked as a scientific advisor for the BBC natural history film unit on an assignment to film pack hunting behaviour in piranha. Peter selected a suitable area of floodplain habitat in the Peruvian Amazon near Iquitos where he thought there was a high likelihood that red-bellied piranhas would be plentiful.
The trip worked out well. With the help of local guides and Peter's fishfinding sonar we selected a small channel leading into a floodplain lake where there were many red-bellied piranha. Piranhas do not instantly attack any animal that falls into the water. However, when stimulated, they can make the water boil as they each rise to take a bite from their victim.		Adult red-bellied piranha.
		The BBC was able to get some good film of a piranha attack on a duck with the final result that the duck was reduced to an almost perfectly clean skeleton! It is certainly true that piranhas can strip a dead body of its flesh in a few minutes. The skeleton of a duck lifted from the water at the end of a piranha attack. There was no flesh left on the otherwise perfectly intact skeleton. The BBC released the film as part of the award-winning documentary series "Ultimate Killers".
Local riverside community near to the filming site about 30 km upstream from Iquitos.

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