Animal · Japan, Philippines, Indonesia
Pufferfish
Tetraodontidae — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
Pufferfish are round, slow swimmers that gulp water to blow themselves up into a ball far too big for most hunters to swallow. Nearly all of them are poisonous as well.
Picture credit: Brocken Inaglory (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Diego Delso (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Kora27 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the pufferfish live?
Home: Warm coasts and reefs, and some tropical rivers.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, Thailand, Mexico, Brazil, Egypt.
The short profile
Fully grown: from about 2.5 cm to more than 60 cm. It weighs about 1 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
There are close to two hundred kinds of pufferfish, most of them in warm seas and about thirty-five in tropical rivers. A puffer has no ribs and a stretchy stomach, so it can pump in mouthful after mouthful of water until it is three or four times its normal size. Small spines that lie flat against the skin stand straight up as the fish swells. Blowing up costs a lot of energy and is a last resort; usually the fish simply swims away. Four teeth fused into a hard beak, two above and two below, crack snail shells and crab legs, and they keep growing all through its life. Many puffers carry tetrodotoxin, a poison they get from bacteria in their food and store in the liver, the skin and other organs. The smallest puffer of all is barely as long as a fingernail is wide.
Find it on the globe
Pufferfish is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Does puffing up hurt the fish?
It is hard work and leaves the fish tired and slow for a while afterwards. A puffer that is made to inflate again and again, for example by being handled, can be seriously harmed.
Where does the poison come from?
Puffers do not make it themselves. Bacteria in the small animals they eat produce tetrodotoxin, and the fish stores it, so puffers raised on clean food end up with almost none.
How do they swim with such small fins?
They flutter the fins on the back and belly and steer with the tail, which is slow but very exact. A puffer can hover on the spot and even swim backwards to look into a crack.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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