Do Puffer Fish Have Bones

How the pufferfish got its wacky spines

The process actually isn't that crazy.

The skeletal structure of the pufferfish. Credit: Gareth Fraser/ IScience

Pufferfish are foreign. They have a reduced skeleton, beak-like dentition and "spines" – spiky peel structures – in certain patches around the torso.

The how and why of the spines has been something of a mystery, but researchers from the University of Florida, US, remember they have the answer afterward following their development in embryos.

Gareth Fraser and colleagues initially hypothesised that the spines formed from scales: that the pufferfish lost its scale component simply retained the spine.

However, they plant that the spines are developmentally unique from scales, and that their development relies on the same network of genes that are commonly expressed within feathers and hairs of other vertebrate animals.

"Information technology just blows me away that regardless of how evolutionarily different skin structures in animals are, they still utilise the same collection of genes during development," Fraser says.

The researchers also found that by blocking genes that are classic markers of pare appendage evolution, they could reduce the number of spines and loosen the restriction on where they appear on the fish.

The findings are published in the periodical iScience.

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