An 8-year-old Pennsylvania boy thought he was about to reel in an ordinary bass during a weekend fishing trip with his dad. Instead, he pulled a razor-toothed surprise straight out of a local lake.

Seamus Coffey was fishing with his father, Michael Coffey, at Ridley Park Lake in Delaware County on Saturday when something suddenly grabbed his line.

Michael figured his son had hooked a bass and told him to reel it in slowly so the fish wouldn’t get away.

Then the creature came out of the water.

“At this point you can’t put anything past Seamus,” Michael later wrote on Facebook. “Today he caught a 2lb red belly piranha out of the Ridley Park Lake! Of all things.”

Michael initially had no idea what they were looking at.

“I was like, ‘Oh, this is a bluegill, I don’t know what this is,’” he told 6ABC.

But Seamus apparently knew exactly what he had caught.

“And he said, ‘It’s a piranha!’”

The 8-year-old recognized the notorious South American predator thanks to the educational fishing and wildlife videos he watches online.

“He knew it was a piranha from his educational fishing videos he watches all over the world,” Michael said.

And Seamus was right.

The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission later confirmed that the mystery fish was, in fact, a red-bellied piranha — a species native to South America and definitely not something normally associated with a Pennsylvania fishing hole.

Still, wildlife officials say strange catches like this happen more often than many people might think.

“So, it’s a little bit more common than we wish,” Mike Parker, communications director for the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, told the New York Post.

“A few times each summer we get reports of something strange like this type of fish, an alligator, a caiman… some sort of exotic snake, reptile, or in this case, a fish.”

Pennsylvania has strict protections for its native wildlife, but residents are allowed to own certain exotic animals. What they cannot do is simply dump those animals into a lake, river or other public waterway when they no longer want them.

Officials believe that is probably what happened here.

“The most likely scenario is that it was an unwanted pet that someone decided to release, essentially making it someone else’s problem,” Parker explained.

Exotic animals can also sometimes make their way into waterways after escaping from the live seafood trade or through cultural release ceremonies.

Had Seamus not caught the piranha, officials believe the fish probably could have survived Pennsylvania’s warm summer months.

Winter would have been another story.

Once water temperatures plunged, the tropical fish likely would not have made it.

But wildlife officials say the bigger concern goes beyond the shock of discovering a piranha swimming around a neighborhood lake.

“When you do introduce something non-native, especially a predator, it can be disruptive to the native ecosystem,” Parker said.

Non-native animals can prey on local wildlife, compete for food and potentially introduce diseases that native species have never encountered.

For Seamus, however, the bizarre catch turned an ordinary day of fishing with Dad into a story he’ll probably be telling for the rest of his life.

He went looking for a bass.

He came home as the 8-year-old who caught a piranha in Pennsylvania.