Horror: 8-year-old boy is left covered in blood and screaming in pain after being attacked by a FISH

An eight-year-old boy from California was left bleeding and screaming in pain after being attacked by a fish on a beach in Montreal, Canada.

Max Mandl played with his father George, an editor working in Hollywood, on an inflatable structure anchored in the artificial lake of the Parc Jean-Drapeau.

As his legs dangled in the water, he began to scream for help after feeling a sharp pain.

“He was in the water next to the raft and immediately started screaming, kicking and hitting out,” the father recalled.

When he started screaming, lifeguards rushed over, pulled Max out of the water by his life jacket and brought him to the dock. The boy was covered in blood.

“Blood was pouring out of his leg in several places. We believe he was attacked by a fish.”

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“The strange thing was that as soon as he came out of the water, he was still screaming and thrashing around. That’s when something clicked in my parental brain and I ran over and saw that there was blood everywhere.”

“One minute you’re just acting and the next you’re at the beginning of Jaws,” George told CTVNews.

Paramedics and two emergency doctors later stated that they had never seen semicircular bite marks with such deep cuts on a human being.

Béatrix Beisner, a professor of life sciences and marine animal researcher at the Université du Québec à Montréal, initially theorized that Max might have scratched himself somewhere.

But after some research, Beisner assumed that the small child might have been bitten by a muskellunge.

The muskellunge, also known as musky or muskie, is a cold-water species and can reach speeds of up to 30 miles per hour.

They are known for having a large snout full of canine-like teeth that are sharp as needles and for being sight feeders that hunt predominantly during the day.

Muskies are stealthy ambush predators that hunt near underwater plants and tree trunks and can live up to 30 years in their natural habitat.

Larger muskies are known to attack and eat almost any living animal: invertebrates, amphibians, small rodents, waterfowl, muskrats, and smaller muskies.

They are found mainly in the north and northeast of the United States and into Canada.