Pleistocene Puffer Fish (Spheroides maculatus)

Pier fishermen often catch what many consider to be “trash” fish.  Stingrays, eels, dogfish, and puffer fish are common in shallow coastal waters during the summer and readily take bait.  Although fishermen usually throw them back in the ocean, they are all good to eat.  Pieces of stingray wings cut with a cookie cutter are used to make mock scallops.  Eel is a delicacy I have enjoyed.  Dogfish, a small species of shark, really does taste like chicken when fried. During WWII when rationing made meat scarce, fishermen caught hundreds of thousands of pounds of puffer fish off Long Island and sold them in New York City fish markets under the name “sea squab.”  However, an important cautionary note needs to be made about consuming puffer fish–its flesh is toxic in some regions.  From researching this topic online, I’ve determined puffer fish caught from North Carolina to Massachusetts are safe to eat, but puffer fish caught from Florida south to the tropics are deadly.  It is against the law to consume puffer fish caught off Florida’s coast because it contains so much saxitoxin.  I have not been able to determine whether puffer fish caught in the border region in between Florida and North Carolina are safe, so I wouldn’t chance it.

 

Video of a man cleaning puffer fish caught off the North Carolina coast.  It yields a piece of fish about the size and shape of a chicken drumstick.

Illustration of puffer fish before and after it blows up.

The northern Atlantic puffer fish, also known as a blowfish, is a member of the Tetraodontinidae family which includes 29 genera and 191 species.  Most of these species occur in tropical waters and are toxic.  The family includes the famous fugu fish served in Japan where specially trained chefs dress them in a way that makes them safe for human consumption.  Toxins are heavily concentrated in the liver and gonads.  Puffer fish inhale air or water when threatened, and they have prickly spines on their scales.  This makes them tough for predators to grasp or swallow.  Ospreys are unable to grab puffer fish.  This defense mechanism has helped this family survive for millions of years.  Definitive fossil evidence of species in the Tetraodontinidae family has been unearthed from strata dating to the Cretaceous over 100 million years ago, and some specimens that may belong to this family were found in Triassic deposits.

The northern puffer fish evolved to live in cooler waters than its tropical cousins.  Cooler ocean currents began to expand in circulation early during the Pliocene when Ice Ages began to occur.  This may be when the northern puffer fish diverged from the southern puffer fish (S. nephulus) which reaches its northern range limit off the coast of north Florida where the 2 species overlap.  In this area northern puffer fish inhabit deeper waters to avoid competion with S. nephulus.  Northern puffer fish move into shallow waters over most of the rest of their range during summer but move to deeper waters when the water temperature seasonally cools.  This pattern may have been disrupted following Ice Age Heinrich Events when  the Gulf Stream shut down due to influxes of glacial meltwater.  There is no known Pleistocene-aged fossil evidence of puffer fish, and scientists have not yet studied the Tetraodontinidae family genome.

Puffer fish prey on crustaceans (schools of puffer fish gang up on blue crabs), molluscs, worms, and sponges; and they consume seaweed and algae. The species of algae they eat in warmer waters is toxic, and this is how they acquire their toxicity.  This explains why the same species is safe to eat when caught from cold waters but toxic from warmer regions.  There is no antidote for this kind of nerve poison.  It shuts down the victim’s nervous system.  A victim may recover in a few hours or days or they may die from suffocation while wide awake as their lungs and heart cease to operate.

Banks, S.; and Anthony Pachee

“Biology and Fishing Data on Northern Puffer (Spheroides maculatus)

NOAA Report 26 1961

Gibbon, Euell

Stalking the Blue-eyed Scallop 

David Mackay Publishing 1964

Tags: fugu, puffer fish, puffer fish poison, Spheroides maculatus