Boy Needs Stitches After Swimming in 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 on vacation in Montreal, took his eight-year-old son Max to Parc Jean-Drapeau for a swim.

It was a warm afternoon and Max was playing on an inflatable structure anchored in the park’s man-made lake.

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

“I felt a kind of electric pain, like when something is stuck into your skin. It was like a knife had just cut my leg,” he said.

Rescuers, then paramedics and two emergency room doctors, said they had never seen anything like it in their lives: a pattern of semicircular scratches punctuated by deep lacerations had appeared around Max’s knee. He appeared to have been assaulted.

“One minute you’re just playing and the next minute you’re at the beginning of Jaws“, Mandl said in an interview.

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

A fish or a scratch

When she first saw the photo of Max’s injury, Béatrix Beisner, a professor of biological sciences who studies lake animals at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), did not believe it could be a fish bite.

“I don’t really know of any fish in our area that would bite a human,” she said. “The only one I know of that would 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 speculated that Max might have scratched himself on something underwater: a piece of metal, perhaps, or a cinder block.

But the structure Max was on was inflatable and children played on it every day. A submerged hazard would likely have been spotted and eliminated.

Beisner, however, changed his mind and said it was “entirely possible” that a fish attacked Max after seeing footage of people being bitten by a muskellunge, also known as a muskie.

Predator at the top of the pyramid

Muskies are the apex predators of lake fish, according to Michael Lazarus, a professional muskie fisherman who spends most of the year guiding tourists around Montreal on casting trips.

They live long and grow large; Lazarus once caught a 55-pound muskellunge. They also eat large prey, including ducks, birds, muskrats and other fish. But they almost never attack humans.

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

Most of these attacks are freak accidents: The fish mistakes a pair of legs hanging over a dock for prey and lunges at it. But Lazarus said he was also bitten by a muskie he had just caught and released. He went back to it and bit it. He required five stitches.

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

“There’s no pike with a bite radius that big,” he said. “However, he could have caught it and hit it from all angles.”

There’s another reason Lazarus doesn’t doubt that a muskie bit Max.

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

“In the spring, when there are floods, the water overflows the basin. That’s how they were able to get in there in the past,” he says. “The fish from the St. Lawrence can get in there. Over the years, I’ve fished there many times. I’ve caught fish there.”

Is it safe?

Jean-Drapeau Park officials declined to answer detailed questions about the incident involving Max. They issued a statement saying they were investigating the June 26 incident in which Max was injured.

Mandl said he hopes awareness of what happened to his son will prompt the park to take steps to ensure this type of attack doesn’t happen again.

Max needed two stitches. He had to take antibiotics and still walks with a slight limp.

Beisner, the biologist, said she hopes the park will be able to catch the muskie, if that’s what bit Max, and remove it.

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

“There’s absolutely no way this is going to happen,” he said. “I mean, it’s been there forever. Everybody’s been swimming in it. This is the first time this has happened.”