What is so damn cool about puffer fish, well let me tell you...

I have started a brand new wonder topic, this time my topic is Pufferfish. I have always been drawn to puffer fish, they have always been an interest of mine. I think that they are super interesting!

One of the first things that I found was on the National Geographic website and found out that the poison that is in Pufferfish is called tetrodotoxin, this poison is extremely deadly, at least to humans. It is up to 1,200 times more deadly than cyanide and can kill up to 30 adult humans. There is no known antidote to the tetrodotoxin. The thing that makes pufferfish so exciting is how they puff up! Pufferfish use their highly elastic stomachs and their ability to quickly ingest huge amounts of water or air, to turn themselves into an inedible ball-looking thing with spines on it's back. In some cases, Pufferfish is seen as a delicacy, in Japan it is called fugu. It is a dish consisting of Pufferfish. It needs to be made by a highly trained chef because if they don't be careful, they could kill someone with the Pufferfishes highly toxic poison. There is a theory that the pufferfishes poison could be the poison involved in the Shakespearean plays. This is just a theory of course, but since I am interested in Shakespeare, I found this quite interesting. The poison that was involved in the death of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. The poison was described as a substance that can make someone appear dead, yet allow them to revive days later apparently unharmed. There is one poison that applies to these symptoms Tetrodotoxin! This is the poison found in pufferfish! But this doesn't apply for to Shakespeare's work because, in his time, he wouldn't have known about pufferfish or their poison at least! Pufferfishes and their poison weren't known of until James Cook's voyages of discoveries in the 1770's. Reports from his second voyage in the southern hemisphere have details of an incident where a number of his crew, after eating fish they had caught, fell very sick. All of the crew members survived, but the onboard pigs that got fed the remainder of the fish did not last very long and most of them died. Shakespeare may have not written about that exact poison, but he ended up elaborating on one that existed in the future!

Pufferfish can be found in tropical waters all over the world, in both saltwater habitats, such as the Pacific Ocean and the Red Sea, and freshwater habitats such as the Mekong River, the Amazon River, and estuaries. The largest pufferfish is the stellate pufferfish, which can grow up to 47 inches long or almost four feet, even longer than some sharks or baby crocodiles. It can be found in and around Africa and Japan. The ferocious pufferfish from around Australia is also large, measuring up to 36 inches, while the giant freshwater puffer from the Congo River can reach 26 inches long. Pufferfish share two traits with chameleons. They can change color, turning lighter or darker in response to their environment, and they can move their eyes independently, meaning they can move their right eye in one direction and their left eye in another so that they are looking at two different things at the same time.