Being ever attracted to that charming word "free" I always go check out whatever people are offering to see if it will fit in any of my tanks. I was pretty sure the dempsey was Way Too Big (sure enough) but googled anyway. Wound up on
the wiki and way down at the bottom found out these interesting bits, listed as trivia. I wonder how many other fish have made it into TV shows by name?
In 1997 the
San Francisco Chronicle reported that a man had died when he put a Jack Dempsey into his mouth as a joke: the fish presumably erected its fin spines to avoid being swallowed, a characteristic cichlid anti-predator response, and became wedged in the man's throat.
[5]
In a second season episode of
Homicide: Life on the Street, a Jack Dempsey is recovered at the scene of a murder, and is taken home by an unsuspecting Detective
John Munch, who intends to give it to his
tropical fish-collecting girlfriend as a present. As a surprise, he places the fish in her
aquarium, where it proceeds to devour $4,000 worth of her fish. Munch later refers to the fish as an "assassin" who "uses
piranhas as
toothpicks."
