1 / 5

Porcupine Puffer Fish Diodon holacanthus

Porcupine Puffer Fish Diodon holacanthus. Puffer Fish. Over 120 species of puffers. All very similar Slow Swimmers Lack dorsal fins Swim with pectoral fins Get their name from their ability to ingest large amounts of water quickly. Fused like beak Nocturnal Predators. Porcupines.

faraji
Download Presentation

Porcupine Puffer Fish Diodon holacanthus

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Porcupine Puffer FishDiodonholacanthus

  2. Puffer Fish • Over 120 species of puffers. • All very similar • Slow Swimmers • Lack dorsal fins • Swim with pectoral fins • Get their name from their ability to ingest large amounts of water quickly. • Fused like beak • Nocturnal Predators

  3. Porcupines • Characteristics • Grow up to 12” (others grow up to 3 feet) • muted or cryptic coloring to blend in with their environment • Environment • Rocky Reefs • Tropical & Subtropical regions across the world.> • Behavior • Very curious species • Aggressive • Diet-Carnivorous • Crabs, squid, mollusks and some echinoderms such as long spined urchins • Predators are Tiger Sharks and sea snakes • Human Interaction • some are kept as pets • “Fugu” is a delicacy in some Asian countries

  4. Are They Dangerous? • Tetradotoxin: A poison found in their skin, intestines, gonads, and liver. • Harmful to fish and deadly to humans if ingested • Fatal within 30 minutes • To humans, tetrodotoxin is deadly, up to 1,200 times more poisonous than cyanide. There is enough toxin in one pufferfish to kill 30 adult humans, and there is no known antidote. • Reserach scientists are working on a powerful painkiller based on tetrodotoxin. • A Port Charlotte research clinic is testing a new drug which uses toxins from the pufferfish to eliminate pain • Many tests and trials have been done with positive results but is not available to the public yet

  5. Citations: 1.  Halstead, Bruce W. Dangerous Marine Animals. Centreville, Maryland: Cornell Maritime Press,1995: 226-8. 2.  Thresher, Ronald E. Reef Fish. St. Petersburg, Florida: Palmetto Publishing Company. 1980:129-130. 3. PufferfishTetraodontidae. PufferfishTetraodontidae. Retrieved from http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/pufferfish/ 4. Photograph by Chris Laughlin/Animals Animals-Earth Scenes 5.Pufferfish toxin helping chemo patients- By Charlie Keegan, Charlotte County Reporter  http://www.nbc-2.com/story/21188753/pufferfish-toxin-helping-chemo-patients 6.Tetrodotoxin for moderate to severe cancer pain: a randomized, double blind, parallel design multicenter study-Epub 2008 Feb 4 Hagen NA, du Souich P, Lapointe B, Ong-Lam M, Dubuc B, Walde D, Love R, Ngoc AH; Canadian Tetrodotoxin Study Group. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18243639

More Related