amazing little puffer fish

source: youtube

Pyramids Found With NASA Satellite

Yoji Ookata who obtained his scuba license at the age of 21 and has since spent the last 50 years exploring and documenting his discoveries off the coast of Japan. Recently while on a dive near Amami Oshima at the southern tip of the country, Ookata spotted something he had never encountered before: rippling geometric sand patterns nearly six feet in diameter almost 80 feet below sea level. He soon returned with colleagues and a television crew from the nature program NHK to document the origins what he dubbed the “mystery circle.”

Underwater cameras showed that the artist was a small puffer fish who, using only his flapping fin, tirelessly worked day and night to carve the circular ridges. The unlikely artist — best known in Japan as a delicacy, albeit a potentially poisonous one — even takes small shells, cracks them, and lines the inner grooves of his sculpture as if decorating his piece. Further observation revealed that this “mysterious circle” was not just there to make the ocean floor look pretty. Attracted by the grooves and ridges, female puffer fish would find their way along the dark seabed to the male puffer fish where they would mate and lay eggs in the center of the circle. In fact, the scientists observed that the more ridges the circle contained, the more likely it was that the female would mate with the male. The little sea shells weren’t just in vain either. The observers believe that they serve as vital nutrients to the eggs as they hatch, and to the newborns.

What was fascinating was that the fish’s sculpture played another role. Through experiments back at their lab, the scientists showed that the grooves and ridges of the sculpture helped neutralize currents, protecting the eggs from being tossed around and potentially exposing them to predators.
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source: thisiscolossal

Right around this time last year, news broke about the discovery of an amazing little puffer fish capable of creating elaborately designed ‘crop circles’ at the bottom of the ocean as part of an elaborate mating ritual. The behavior was first documented by a photographer named Yoji Ookata who later returned with a film crew from the Japanese nature show NHK which later aired an episode about the fish.

Even as articles bounced around the web it was still difficult to imagine how a tiny fish could create such a large design in the sand, even when staring directly at photographic evidence. Finally, video has emerged that shows just how the little guy delicately traverses the sand in a rotating criss-cross pattern to create a sort of subaquatic spirograph. The textured sand sculpture not only attracts mates but also serves as protection when the fish pair and lays eggs.