Pufferfish are unique and fun animals. Today I will be talking to you about the pufferfish. I will also be covering, Name & Classification, Habitat, Appearance and Anatomy, Diet, Defencive Behaviors, and Enemies

The pufferfishes place in the animal kingdom is Animalia. Its phylum is Chordata and its order is Tetraodontiformes. Its class is Actinopterygii and its family is Tetraodontidae. Believe it or not, its scientific name is Tetraodontidae, which is the same as its family. The puffer is also known as the blowfish or toadfish. Its group name is a school, ( Like a fish group.) and it has over 120 species types. 

A pufferfishes habitat is interesting. It can only survive in optimum 

5.7-6.4 PH waters. (PH is the scale of alkalinity and acidity of a liquid. The higher the number, the more alkalic it is. The lower the number, the more acidic. The PH scale goes from 0-14.) Some are found in tropical and subtropical waters. They also are found in brackish and even fresh fresh water.

They are scaleless fish, but most have spines on their skin. They also have “two teeth” but really  they have two teeth fused together. It is also one of the only fish that has the ability to blink. They also have highly elastic stomachs, so they can do all sorts of things like, suck in water to puff up, store food, and store their tetrodotoxin. If a pufferfish is not puffed up and in defense, it looks like a normal fish, but with a bulbous head and tiny fins and a long tapered body. Not puffed up, most puffers size from 1 inch to 2 feet. If a pufferfish is puffed up, and in defence, it can quadruple its size! The biggest puffer in the world puffs up to 4ft & 4in wide! That is absolutely massive! 

A puffers diet is kind of like a regular fish's diet. This includes invertebrates, algae, shrimp, crab and mussels. The crack open the shellfish with their 4, sharp, fused teeth and eat their food. They use this diet to make their tetrodotoxin which is their strong poison.

All fish have to have something special about them. For pufferfish, it’s puffing up and having tetrodotoxin on the tip of their spines. As I said before, a pufferfishes tetrodotoxin is 1,200X more powerful than cyanide, so, one pufferfish has enough tetrodotoxin to kill 30 adults in one lifetime. That’s a lot of tetrodotoxin!

When a pufferfish has a predator coming in on it, it puffs up and the predator gets scared away because  of the fast, unsettling, and sudden growth of size. If not,it will eat the puffer, but the puffer will inject the rest of its tetrodotoxin at the last second and the predator will die a long painful death.  Predators include, humans, large fish and a variety of sharks. The only animal that is immune to this extremely poisonous animal is one rare species of shark and one rare species of eel. 

Overall, pufferfish are the 2017 2nd most poisonous animals in the world! Even though it is the 2nd most poisonous animal, people eat it in Korea and Japan. There are over 1,500 deaths in Japan and Korea each year due to incorrect pufferfish preparation.  (복어)(河豚; 鰒; フグ) I hope you enjoyed this and recommend it to others.