Male Pufferfish Create Ornate Artworks Underwater To Impress Potential Mates

Lovebirds kiss, otters hold hands, and swans stick to single partners. What other grand gestures of love do you see out in nature? As it turns out, the male white-spotted pufferfish pours weeks into designing the perfect artwork to attract a mate.

David Attenborough drew focus to this impressive skill by “probably nature’s greatest artist” in an episode of BBC Earth’s Big Pacific.

To make up for his overall dullness, the male expresses his brilliance by shoveling into sand and creating “underwater mandalas,” as described by Good News Network, using just his fins and belly. He then adorns his work with seashells.

If the intricate circle impresses a female, it becomes a nest to lay eggs and make baby puffers.

In other words, build a prefab love nest, decorate it, and ask her to move in.

According to Attenborough, there is no other phenomenon in nature in which an animal puts together “something as complex and perfect as this.”

Explaining the creation process of a pufferfish, a 2018 paper published by Ryo Mizuuchi and team in the Scientific Reports journal describes: “To initiate the construction, a pufferfish makes a mark by pushing its belly on the sandy bottom as the central region of a nest.”

Then, “it repeatedly excavates the sand with its fins and body to leave marks hundreds or thousands of times, during which the radial ditches in the outer ring region gradually appear. Thereafter, it excavates the inner region to form a maze-like structure.”

And time is of essence. The fish has to act quickly at work, lest the current wipes out his masterpiece.

[via Laughing Squid, Good News Network, Scientific Reports, images via various sources]