The porcupine fish is often confused with the puffer fish, as they look very similar. They are actually closely related but porcupine fish are part of the Diodontidae family whereas pufferfish are part of the Tetradontidae family. The main way to tell these two families apart is that porcupine fish (NOT pufferfish) have spines!
These loveable fish are probably some of the most well know and coolest fish in our oceans. They are nocturnal species, although they can be seen during the day and they live in the shallow tropics, often sticking close to reefs, caves wrecks etc. for protection. They are pretty big compared to most reef fish, and you can’t miss them as they look very odd in the water. Being an odd square shape they are pretty lumpy swimmers… if this species was a car it would be a closer to a useless tank than a Ferrari. Its box shape is just not great for getting around in the sea. When pufferfish are scared, they firstly just swim away, but compared to the other fish in the ocean, especially the species big enough to eat it this swimming away doesn’t really do much. But… it makes up for its odd shape in three awesome defence mechanisms.
I saw this beast of a porcupine fish on a night snorkel in Puerto Rico.
Firstly, the classic example most people know about is that they blow up! So if they get really scared and stressed they can unhinge its jaw and inhale large amounts of water to inflate its body. This gives the classic porcupine (and pufferfish) look. With the inflation the height of the fish pretty much doubles meaning no predator is going to be able to fit it into its mouth! Only sharks at this point would really have a shot.
The second defence is when there inflated they have spines, these spines further increase the body size and nothing would ever want to eat anything spikes! This species really has the don’t eat me look about it!
Furthermore, even if with the inflation the porcupine fish managed to get eaten, they have a another mechanism to avoid other/future members of its species getting eaten. They have extremely toxic tissues full of the toxin tetrodotoxin, that is one of the most toxic positions on the planet! Its over 100 times more potent that cyanide and will kill humans too if you eat it. In nature things learn surprisingly quickly of not eating species if it has killed your friends and family! This toxin can pretty much put predators eating this species.
Even though there boxed shaped still couldn’t quite catch up to get a closer picture of this beauty!
So these slow swimming odd shaped fish hold nasty surprise after surprise for anything that tries to eat it! This way they can just happily continue living there lives, maybe once in a while scaring the hell out of some predators for a laugh! Plus they do this while looking so cute with those gorgeous big eyes, and that is why the porcupine fish is AMAZING.
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