CHECKERED PUFFERS

For me the most attention-getting fish easily and habitually seen almost anytime I go walking along the storm wall or look into the shallow waters between boats tied up along shore is the Checkered Puffer, SPHOEROIDES TESTUDINEUS. You can see one, maybe 10 inches long, here.

That image shows a heavily spotted, big-headed, thick-bodied fish with bulging, froglike eyes. The fish in the picture is lying on the bottom, but the ones I see are always unhurriedly swimming along, so exposed to the world you have to guess that they possess some kind of secret weapon. I have no fish books so to get a name I had to ask a kid.

"Pez Globo," the boy said, absolutely amazed that a huge, bald gringo would simply walk up and ask something like that. The name means "Balloon Fish," and I said I couldn't see anything about it that reminded me of a balloon.

"When the fish gets scared, he blows himself up, all at once, like this, a GLOBO..."

Later I spoke with a fisherman and asked him whether that clumsy looking fish happening to be swimming by really was a Pez Globo.

"Yes, and we sell them to the Japanese. The Japanese eat everything from the water other people don't eat, even these, which are so poisonous. Yes, POISONOUS. You have to prepare the fish very carefully because if poison from the poison gland gets onto what you eat it'll kill you. In Japan they make people who order it sign a legal paper saying they've been warned and if they get sick or die the restaurant isn't liable, and still people want to eat it!"

The fish's poison is one known technically as a saxitoxin. In some places the fish has been used to kill dogs and cats and in Haiti it's been documented as an ingredient in a potion concocted to turn people into zombies. If you want follow up on that, go to http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/caribarch/zombi.htm.

So, being able to blow yourself into a balloon too big to fit between a predator's jaws, and having a poison gland that can kill enemies or maybe turn them into zombies -- no wonder this fish of all the estuary's species feels so at ease that it can swim in broad daylight in shallow water next to shore!

Up North English speakers call the fish Checkered Puffer, and the species is found all along the Gulf Coast and a good deal north along the Atlantic Coast. Southward it extends all the way to Brazil.

I've only seen Checkered Puffers try to catch immature, big-eyed shrimp moving along the storm wall but I read that the species eats bivalves, gastropods, foraminiferans and several other invertebrates, including it's main meal, crusty crustaceans like my shrimp, which it crushes with powerful teeth.