The lake at Tom Bass Regional Park near Pearland made national news recently when 5-year-old Lindsay Schutte caught her first fish – a red-bellied piranha.

Thanks to our seemingly endless drought, water levels are at record lows, creating a balmy freshwater environment perfect for this type of invasive predator fish. Native to the Amazon Basin, the pygocentrus nattereri has only been verified on one other occasion in the state’s history, not counting the filming of 1978’s Piranha in San Marcos.

“It’s illegal to buy and own piranhas in Texas,” Rico Saravia from the Fish Gallery (2909 Fountain View) told CultureMap. “Although, you can purchase them in some northern states where it’s too cold for them to reproduce in the wild.”

An online dealer in New Jersey, for example, sells one-inch piranhas for $5 a piece.

An avid fisherman himself, Saravia was surprised to hear of the red-bellied piranha found at Tom Bass, where he’s fished several times in the past year. Harris County keeps the fishing lake stocked with bass, catfish, and rainbow trout.

“If people get them into a bayou down here in Houston, there could be a good chance they could breed,” he said, relieved to hear only a single piranha was found in a relatively isolated body of water.

Described by online retailer AquaScape as having “a relatively nervous” character, the skittish red-bellied piranha is known for lunging at human fingers through the aquarium glass. Lindsay Schutte’s older brother, in fact, received a fairly nasty bite when examining the Tom Bass specimen.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department notes a marked rise in invasive species, as the Internet provides new avenues for fish collectors. While the non-native talapia has disrupted ecosystems in state’s waterways since the 1950s, new exotic species are beginning to emerge – like a freshwater stingray that recently surfaced in Buffalo Bayou.

“The armored catfish is one of our biggest issues,” says Robert Goodrich, assistant chief of fisheries at the TPWD. “People buy them to help eat aquarium algae, not knowing just how big they’ll get. So they just toss them. A young kid caught one recently that was over 20 inches long.”

In the past year, armored catfish have been spotted throughout the Houston Ship Channel.

“We’re really trying to get out the message about invasive fish,” Goodrich says, noting the TPWD website as a source for information on illegal species. “If you think you found a suspicious fish, please look into it and report it to the authorities.”