A puffer the size of your thumb, and one that only got its own name in 2008. Before that everyone here photographed it as the spotted toby, Canthigaster solandri, until Randall and colleagues separated the 🌊 Indian Ocean fish and called it cyanospilota, the blue-spotted one.
Sharpnose puffers are slow and lightly built, without the heavy body armor of their larger relatives. What they have instead is chemistry: tetrodotoxin in the skin and organs, which the fish does not make itself but accumulates from bacteria that arrive with its food, plus a bitter skin mucus that makes a mouthful unpleasant well before it becomes fatal. A predator that tries one does not try a second.
It works alone over sand and rubble at the edge of the reef, picking at whatever is small and attached - sponges, tunicates, algae, worms, small crustaceans - with a beak of four fused teeth strong enough to crack shell.
Up close it is worth a stop. The blue markings are dense over the head and body, the tail carries blue lines along its length, and the snout usually shows green above.
The genus. Canthigaster Swainson 1839 - [a]canthus (thorn or spine) + gaster (belly). ETYFish
The species. Canthigaster cyanospilota Randall, Williams & Rocha 2008 - cyano- (blue) + spilota (marked). ETYFish
- small pear-shaped puffer with a pointed snout
- tan body with three oblique brown saddles
- dense bright blue spots and short lines over the head and body
- blue lines running the length of the tail, green cast on the snout
- up to 10 cm
Why it's threatened
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
