Father and son Ron and Frank Rossi caught the scary looking Pacu fish more than 3,000 miles from its home.
The Nutcracker, which are related to the notoriously carnivorous Piranha, have rows of tough teeth which it uses for eating nuts which fall from trees.
Ron said: "We scoop this thing and brought it up. We didn’t know what kind of fish it was.
"We did pull the bottom lip down to see what they looked like and they have almost human teeth. It’s exactly what it looked like on the internet."
The Rossi, from New Jersey in America, caugh the Pacu fish which originates from an Amazon river in Brazil in a man made lake.
However, experts were on hand to dispel the myth that the fish eats men's testes.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's Lawrence Hajna said: "People confuse them as piranhas a lot, but they have teeth made for grinding instead.
"They’ll eat nuts that drop in the water in the rain forest, hence the urban legend that they eat a certain part of the male anatomy [the testes].
"Just to clarify, they don't eat the male anatomy."
It is believed the fish became too big for an aquarium in New Jersey, where it was being kept as a pet, and its owner would have thrown it into the lake.
Mr Hajna said it was not uncommon to find Pacu which had outgrown their aquariums in New Jersey, with one or two found in lakes every year.
But authorites have urged people who no longer want to keep the Pacu fish as pets to destroy them humanely instead of throwing them into nearby waters.
