Put this in the “nature is awesome” category along with Aleutian Magic. The tiny fish – ranging in size from 20 to 37cm (roughly 8 to 15 inches) – has incredibly strong and oversized jaw muscles that allow it to exert bite force 30 times its body weight. This doesn’t mean that the fish has the most forceful bite in the natural world. Sharks, tasmanian devils, hyenas and alligators all have more forceful bites, but they are of course much larger animals. Relative to its size, piranhas even outperform prehistoric giants such as Tyrannosaurus Rex and megalodon, a massive type of shark that came before the great white, when it comes to sheer force of its bite.
To figure out the pressure of the bite, audacious scientists literally risked life and limb (well, at least fingers) by catching 15 black piranhas in the Amazon River and sticking a tool that measures force in between the fish’s razor teeth lined jaws. These were the first measurements taken live from piranhas and showed that the force of the bite was 320 newtons (a newton is a metric measure of force). That force is three times greater than a tiny U.S. alligator of the same size. No wonder there have been documented cases of piranhas chomping off human fingers.
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