How do blowfish puff up

My friend Wes Dowd is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Washington State University who currently studies mussels and tiny crustaceans called copepods in tidepools. Much of his training was with fish and he has always been curious about life in the ocean. He remembers these fish were a lot different than the bass or flounder he usually caught. The yellowish puffer fish had spines around its body, puffy cheeks, and a little beak-like mouth. Consider one old study in which researchers watched birds go fishing.

The birds caught 11 puffer fish, but they dropped nearly half of them because the fish started to inflate. But what's more surprising is that the birds left with empty beaks might have been the lucky ones.

Because puffers have another, more potent defense up their sleeves. Their bodies are laced with a neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin. It's up to 1, times more poisonous than cyanide. So poisonous that one puffer fish can kill 30 adult humans. So poisonous that puffers are reportedly the second most poisonous vertebrate in the world, which is why it's also surprising that us humans?

We actually eat them. That's right. In Japan, puffer fish is actually a delicacy called fugu, which only trained chefs can prepare. And considering that these fish are basically spike balls filled with poison and we're still serving them in restaurants, they must be seriously delicious. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Although puffers have evolved to suck in water, if lifted out they can sometimes suck in air.

They sometimes have difficulties expelling this from their stomach, so take extra care when catching them. Features Post The World's forgotten fishes 16 August This doesn't always work, especially if the fish recognizes you. Some puffers adapt to use their puffing as a way to ask for food. They may puff up to get your attention when they haven't been fed in a while. Puffer fish puff up as a defense mechanism, as a way to scare off rivals and as a way to attract a mate.

The body of a puffer fish can swell to over two and a half times its original size as a way to scare off predators.