An eight-year-old boy from California was left bleeding and screaming in pain after being attacked by a fish while on a beach in Montreal, Canada.
Max Mandl was playing with his father, George, a Hollywood-based editor, on an inflatable structure moored in the artificial lake at Parc Jean-Drapeau.
As her legs dangled in the water, she began screaming for help after feeling a sharp pain.
“He was in the water, next to the raft, and all of a sudden he started screaming, kicking and thrashing around,” his father recalled.
As soon as he started screaming, lifeguards rushed to pull Max out of the water by his life jacket and carried him to the dock; the boy was covered in blood.
Eight-year-old Max Mandl was left bleeding and screaming in pain after being attacked by a fish while on a beach in Montreal, Canada.
“He had blood gushing out of his leg in several places. We believe he had been attacked by a fish.”
“The weird thing was that as soon as he got out of the water, he was still screaming and thrashing around. That’s when something in my fatherly brain clicked and I ran over and saw that there was blood everywhere.”
“One minute you’re just playing and the next you’re at the beginning of Jaws,” George said. CTV News.
Paramedics and two emergency room doctors later said they had never seen semicircular bite marks with such deep lacerations on a person.
Béatrix Beisner, a professor of biological sciences who studies lake animals at the University of Quebec in Montreal, was the first to theorize that Max might have scratched himself somewhere.
But after doing some research, Beisner went on to say that the boy could have been bitten by a muskellunge.
“One minute you’re just playing and the next you’re at the beginning of Jaws,” said father George Mandl.
Muskelung are stealthy predators that hunt by ambush near brush and submerged logs and can live up to 30 years in the wild.
The muskellunge, also known as the musky or muskie, is a coldwater species and can reach speeds of 30 miles per hour.
They are known to possess a large snout filled with canine-like teeth, which are needle-sharp, and they feed visually and hunt primarily during the day.
Muskelung are stealthy predators that hunt by ambush near brush and submerged logs and can live up to 30 years in the wild.
Larger muskies are known to attack and consume almost any living animal, invertebrates, amphibians, small rodents, waterfowl, muskrats, and smaller muskies.
They are found mainly in the northern and northeastern part of the United States and up to Canada.
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