The government regional fishing superintendency this week authorized fishermen to use normally illegal fine-mesh nets to catch palometas and kill them. вЂіWeвЂ™ve got our annual beauty contest coming up this month, the big event of our tourist season, and we just canвЂ™t have this problem,вЂі Oliveira said. And besides, the alligators themselves could attack the swimmers.вЂіДЇor now, the town has set up nets around a section of river 200 yards long and 50 yards out from the shore to protect bathers. He added, вЂіWe also could put alligators in the river, but we donвЂ™t want to do that. вЂіWe could stock the river with dourado, but when they go upriver to spawn they tend not to return,вЂі said Jose Carlos de Oliveira, municipal secretary of sports and tourism in Rosario do Sul. Officials admit they donвЂ™t know what to do to stop the attacks. Alligators have been hunted to the point of endangerment by poachers who sell the hides. The numbers of dourado, an excellent eating fish related to the game fish known in the United States as the dorado, have been depleted seriously by sportsmen and by toxic runoff from pesticides, he said. The biologist said the superpopulation of palometas was a result of the virtual disappearance of the fishвЂ™s natural enemies, the dourado fish and the alligator. But he discarded a popular theory that the fish is a product of cross-breeding between the vicious piranha and the passive palometa. Lucena said scientists were studying whether the new aggressive palometa could be a previously unknown species of the piranha-palometa family. Unlike the piranha, attacks in schools and can devour a cow or a man in minutes, the palometa usually strikes singly and merely inflicts painful bites on its victim. It grows to about a foot in length and lives in the fresh waters of southern Brazil, which are too cool for the warm- water piranha. The palometa is a flat, oval fish with sharp triangular teeth that looks like a smaller version of the piranha. Five people were pulled from the water bleeding profusely from bites on their feet and legs.ДЄ similar attack was reported in January in Uruguaiana, a city on the Uruguay river on the border with Argentina. In December, palometas attacked a group of swimmers at a camping resort area in Rosario do Sul, a rio Grande do Sul town of 30,000 on the Santa Maria river 1,300 miles southwest of Rio de Janeiro. вЂіWeвЂ™ve always had palometas in our rivers, but they never were so aggressive before,вЂі said biologist Carlos Lucena of the Agriculture Department of Rio Grande do Sul, BrazilвЂ™s southernmost state on the borders of Argentina and Uruguay. The southern cousin of the voracious piranha that terrorizes swimmars in lakes and rivers in BrazilвЂ™s Amazon and Mato Grosso regions is multiplying out of control and has shown a marked change in behavior, according to government scientists. RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) _ The palometa, an ordinarily peaceful relative of the flesh-eating piranha, is turning vicious because of overpopulation and has begun attacking swimmers in southern Brazil.

Piranha attack game