A boy needed stitches after swimming in a man-made lake in Montreal. Did a fish attack him?

WARNING: This story contains graphic images of a leg injury.

Last week, George Mandl, an American vacationing in Montreal, took his eight-year-old son Max swimming in Parc Jean-Drapeau.

It was a hot afternoon and Max was playing on an inflatable structure anchored in the park’s artificial lake.

His legs dangled in the blue-green darkness and he felt a sharp pain. He screamed and when lifeguards pulled him out of the water, his leg was bleeding.

“It felt like an electric pain, like the pain you get when something is stabbed into your body. It felt like a knife had just cut my leg,” he said.

The lifeguards, and later the paramedics and two emergency doctors, said they had never seen anything like it: around Max’s knee there was a pattern of semicircular abrasions, interrupted by deep cuts. He appeared to have been attacked.

“One minute you’re just playing and the next you’re at the beginning of The White sharksaid Mandl in an interview.

Anglers say it’s possible that Max was attacked by a large, carnivorous fish, but such attacks are extremely rare. The nature of Max’s injuries has puzzled some experts and led to an investigation by Parc Jean-Drapeau officials who are trying to answer the question: What happened to Max?

A fish or a scratch

When Béatrix Beisner, a professor of life sciences and researcher at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) who studies marine animals, first saw the picture of Max’s injury, she did not believe it could have been a fish bite.

“I don’t know of any fish in our area that could bite a human,” she said. “The only fish I know of that could bite a human is a snapping turtle, and they’re more likely to bite a toe or a finger. Their mouths aren’t that big.”

She suspected that Max might have scraped himself on something underwater: perhaps a piece of metal or a block of cement.

But the structure Max was on is inflatable and children play on it every day. An underwater hazard would likely have been discovered and eliminated.

However, Beisner changed her mind and said it was “entirely possible” that a fish had attacked Max when she saw pictures of people who had been bitten by a fish.

Top predator

Muskies are the largest predatory fish in the ocean, says Michael Lazarus, a professional muskie angler who spends most of the year guiding tourists around Montreal and fishing for fish.

They live long lives and grow large; Lazarus once caught a 57-pound muskie. They also eat large prey, including ducks, birds, muskrats, and other fish. But they almost never attack humans.

Lazarus arrived on his fishing boat Thursday after catching two big muskies in the morning in the waters around Montreal. He said he’s only heard of four or five bites in decades of muskie fishing.

Most of these attacks are random: the fish mistakes a pair of feet dangling over a dock for prey and snaps at prey. But Lazarus said he was also bitten once by a muskie he had just caught and released. It swam toward him and bit him. He had to have five stitches.

In this case, Max’s injury seemed consistent with a muskie bite, although it appeared to be larger than Lazarus would have expected.

“There’s no muskie with that kind of bite radius,” he said. “But he could have grabbed it and hit it from all sorts of angles.”

There is another reason why Lazarus has no doubt that a pike bit Max.

Muskies are plentiful around Montreal. Although the lake where Max was swimming is man-made and separated from the St. Lawrence River by a series of filters, Lazarus knows there are muskies there. He said he used to catch them there before the lake was closed to fishing 20 years ago.

“In the spring, when there is high tide, the water overflows the basin. That’s how they’ve gotten in in the past,” he said. “The fish from the St. Lawrence can get in there. I’ve fished there many times over the years. I’ve caught fish there.”

Is it safe?

Officials at Parc Jean-Drapeau declined to answer detailed questions about the incident involving Max. They said in a statement that they are investigating the June 26 incident when Max was injured.

Mandl said he hopes raising awareness about his son’s incident will prompt the park to take action to prevent such attacks from happening again.

Max had to be stitched twice. He had to take antibiotics and still limps slightly.

Biologist Beisner expressed her hope that the park would be able to catch and release the pike if it had bitten Max.

But Lazarus, the muskie angler, said the fish had probably been in the pool for years and would never bite a human again.

“Absolutely no chance,” he said. “I mean, it’s always been there. Everyone swims in it. This is the first time it’s happened.”