The Puffer Forum

Corvus wrote:

RVS wrote:

the puffing mechanism in tetraodontids and diodontids is different by the way

I would like to know more about this corvus, i used to thing it was the same mechanism in all puffers (regardless water type).

It's not the water type, it's the family. In common English diodontids (porcupine puffers and burrfishes) are also called puffers, but they are a seperate family (some other languages are more precise here). Not only do their teeth differ but also their puffing sac. Tetraodontids ("true puffers") have a seperate sac to inflate (seperated form the stomach by a sphincter), diodontids use their stomach.

The basics are also briefly described in http://www.brown.edu/Departments/EEB/br ... jmorph.pdf This paper also briefly discusses how useful (or sometimes not) it is for a puffer to puff to escape inflation and how epidermis and underlying layers are organized. Puffing is not only to avoids predation, but also for social interaction.

ok im taking a guess here from what ive seen with puffed puffers: so if you look at a puffed porky and the puffed gsp, the gsp's back and head look normal, but on a porcupine, hes like a big spiky ball with a face? or am i talking about something completely different?

That's another small difference between Diodon and tetraodontids, hadla.

Ummm different sacs, thats new for me, and quite interesting by the way... I'm on the middle of the Brainerd´s document and i can say that is more than illuminating, thanks for the pdf.

I also agree with the language topic about calling puffer to everything that inflates, in spanish a diodon is a "pez erizo" (that means urchin fish) and puffers are "pez globo" (that means ballon fish) but anyway, confusion or misinformation still dominates.

Hadla´s example is good but not exact at all, I mean, i agree on the gsp comparation but there are also puffers with bigger inflation sacs that allow them to look like a "big ball with a face", arothron species for example, but something is clear, huge difference is in the teeth & spikes.