Pufferfish are cute, and most pufferfish are toxic. Like people, they spend their weeks moving between states of puffed up and deflated. Or, really, three states: normal, puffed up and then the hangover after the puffing up. Ironically, the pufferfish toxin, called tetrodotoxin, is deadly because it stops a person’s diaphragm from moving – in other words, it stops you from being able to puff yourself up. And you could see that as a lesson for wanting to eat them in the first place.
You’re wondering what is inside a blown-up pufferfish, how they inflate. Firstly: it is not air, or else they would pop up and out of the water like a balloon in a swimming pool. Also, air is hard to come by down there. They turn themselves into absurd-looking spherical objects by sucking water – something called, grossly, “buccal pumping” – into their extremely elastic stomachs. They don’t have ribs, which helps. This gives predators a fright – but perhaps more to the point, large spheres are hard to swallow.
After they do this, they feel very tired, and take five hours to get back to normal. Which seems like around the time it might take a person to feel normal again after freaking out. You could say that it is ego that makes them puff up: do you have any idea what they are capable of?
If there is one person you want to hear say the word “pufferfish” repeatedly, it is David Attenborough, who describes the pufferfish as “probably nature’s greatest artist”. If you have ever met an artist, you will know that the word “probably” will haunt that fish for the rest of its days. Like an animal expanded so widely that its little face shrinks into its body and its peripheral vision – despite independently moving eyes – is restricted, the artist, deflated, will fail to remember the word “greatest”, and remember only that there is some doubt.
As Attenborough speaks – godlike, invisible – the pufferfish wriggles the part where a fish’s butt would be if a fish had one; not the tail, but upwards, like where a mermaid’s rear would be. He wriggles this way and that, making patterns in the way a person might in a Japanese dry garden (known in the western world in the 1990s as a “Zen garden”).
And what he produces is mind-blowingly symmetrical. The fish is about 10cm long. What he makes is 2 metres wide. It takes him more than a week to make. His creation looks very much like a flower, with a centre like a sunflower’s, and a radiating, petal-like pattern. It is symmetrical, which is hard to do if you are eye-height with your creation.
If the female approves, she will descend to the ocean floor and mate with the male. Most female pufferfish store their toxin in their ovaries, which is where I store my most toxic chemicals, too. Their names are progesterone, oestrogen; they make me puff up with determination, sensitivity, mania, irritability and also water retention.
Dolphins have been seen playing with pufferfish before, according to one theory, entering a trance-like state because of the mild narcotic effects of the poison in the pufferfish’s skin. They appeared, to one writer, to be “mesmerised by their own reflections at the water’s surface”. After thinking about pufferfish for a few hours, I see my reflection, too. And it is hard to swallow.
Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia
Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
• The main image on this article was amended on 3 December 2024. An earlier version showed a porcupinefish instead of a pufferfish.
