The Pufferfish Did It!

Mysterious crop circles may still remain mysterious - but the ones found at the bottom of the sea need not be!  We've got the culprit: and we didn't even need to ask Aquaman to find him for us...

It was Peter the Pufferfish! (What - him, again?!?)
And he pleaded guilty immediately, while invoking the main reason to have done it as being all for... love! Or a mating ritual, really...

Let's all be intrusive quite a bit and become peeping toms to Peter The Pufferfish's groovy and funky ways to ''set up the atmosphere'' there, under the sea...!  Just watch this:

Courtesy of: LiveScience.com  - and Yahoo Jen Markham, too!

Snooping around on a pufferfish's sex life on Friday night was what we aaaaaall needed, I guess, in order to properly set up our own week-end rituals, hmm?  Thanks, News Folks!  

(Although, we find it funny that, all previous sources of information on this topic were not as, well, not as stuffy as the source that provided us, somehow, with a, finally, truly interesting video to embed here which sums up the Pufferfish's Labour Of Love - a video that is not on the insufferable, often inconclusive YouTube either! These species of egghead, however, wants its stuff not to be alluded to, not even reworded in a far more, ah, shall we say aquamusing way indeed, not even for the totally FAIR USE of ongoing education?  What stuffiness, what supercilious disdain for the masses that populate the seas (the seas of people, granted) - what haughty elitism! Drown them all, we say! Feed these abysmal eggheads to the fishies: for they do not even deserve to observe them, much less catch, dissect and consume them with fries and cheap beer! And we, at aquamusings, in spiteful disdain ourselves, shall henceforth refer to these little minds that like to question and doubt everything and anything, as nothing other than... petty eggheads! READ ON...)

This article, therefore, follows up on several previous, infinitely more scientific reports, on the very same subject. These circles had been enigmatic for a long time, you see, and scientific scrutiny eventually dug up the truth about them - right out of the ocean floor, where our sins have sunk to as well, some say, or sing really. Needless to say, Nature.com's account goes into, ah, deeper detail shall we say - and, then, we had various other sources for this very aquamusing subject here!

Alas, with the latest brand of extrapolation, immediate comparisons were drawn with the bowerbirds and their lowly 'bowers'' which are quite unfair as, if with the birdies, the mating ritual is all but an illusion, with the pufferfish, it is a very real deal, in an environment very much conducive for the end result and ultimate goal of the entire ordeal. For, unlike humans whose sex life may be strictly for carnal pleasure and spare time fulfillment, the fishies' business here is all for much-needed breeding and survival of the race more than ever precarious in the conditions the seas are getting to be encased in, these sad, sad days of aquatic depreciation and such... (We'll talk about THAT soon enough, here...)

And to think that scientists and petty eggheads alike had been baffled by these ''mysterious underwater circles'' for decades prior to these findings...!  The Yahoos delineate 1995 as the starting point of the puzzling over them: but, surely, others had noticed the circles before the divers that spotted some off the coast of Japan on that watershed year? The seafloor around Japan had never been scrutinized before 1995?  Please...!  Most probably all the divers who spotted them took the remarkably well-defined geometric shapes to have been the work of either Atlanteans or Aliens; so many important ''messages'' sent to us, or more appropriately, to them, who were diving in those waters...!  Only now have the petty eggheads, remarkably imaginative about things themselves, sometimes, somehow, finally discovered who the ''artist'' behind these shapes really is: and it is indeed none other than a sea creature after all!  What were the odds, hmm? 

Mind you, it is not just your average, oddly-spiky pufferfish that did it: it is a newly-discovered species of pufferfish! So maybe it is an alien race after all...  These pufferfishies make ornate circles like that in order to attract mates and procreate: it is the male that is the artist here, interesting to note, as the patterns come about after he flaps his fins ''laboriously'' they say; we'll say ''meticulously'' here!  And so he swims in circles, for hours and hours along the seafloor, basically creating the love-nest for his beloved out of disrupted sediment floating around the murky depths; hey, it's the intention that counts, right?  The horny little sea-devil makes amazing work that reaches up to seven feet in diameter; while, he, measures no more than five inches long! Quite obviously, the desire he feels is stronger than anything down there!  And it works! Once they are finished with their artwork, which doubles as a very practical building process, the females swim over and inspect the final results; if they like the love-bed that was so fervently made for them, they procreate with the male on the spot!  None of the observing sea-diving eggheads have a clue, yet, exactly what the female fish's criteria might be here - all they know is that this is the process and true reason why those circles are made in the first place.  The males are basically designing a bullseye for the females to deposit their eggs. Once those are laid in the fine sediments at the center of the circle there, the male, as owner of that circle, has the duty of fertilizing the eggs externally. It is a fine collaboration with the only true purpose being to insure the perpetuation of their species, in fact. For, once the female is done laying the eggs, she swims away. It is the male that stays on for a time, up to an additional week, presumably to guard the fertilized eggs.

Fascinating - as some pointy-eared less execrable alien would say (obviously not Namor!) 

What makes these circles and mating rituals so unique is the fine attention to detail brought to it by this variety of pufferfish: Peter, here, demonstrates quite the sense of aesthetics, to say the least! (Although the aesthetic nature of it all is in dispute by the egghead community - as well it should be.)  The apparent artistic touch comes in a three-fold intricate process of creation, too! Our Peter here initially makes sure that there are circular and evenly-spaced passages (radially-aligned ridges and valleys, as some eggheads would say!) outside his nest site, in a perfect geometric design that reeked of alien intelligence, for some others, too!  Then our Peter makes it imperative to decorate these roads -yes, decorate them; or so it seems- with fragments of shells, nothing less!  Finally, he pays attention to color schemes too -nothing is too much in order to attract the best female eggs, we suppose!- gathering up the finest sediments he can possibly find on the ocean floor in order to give the final result both a distinctive shape on top of a particular color!  Everything has to be unique and perfect for Mrs.Pufferfish here - or so it would appear! Overall, all the hard work takes roughly a week indeed for the Pufferfish to complete it: sometimes up to nine days! No such hard labours have yet been found to have been done for nothing, so far: every Peter got a lady puffer who found his circle fit enough to dignify with her eggs...!  The artistic merit is disputed though: it might all be a huge bullseye for the ladies indeed and nothing more than that... boo-hoo!  One wonders what other disappointing conclusion these petty eggheads will come to (and proudly share with the masses) regarding other aqua-mysteries out there...! We are so NOT holding our breath to find out - read - or blog about it...! 

Now... Pufferfish are not alone doing such wondrous things simply in order to mate -or going to such depths just to attract the female counterpart's attention- Featherfin Cichlids (aka furcifers - not lucifers!) apparently make small bowls out of sand in which to deposit all necessary ingredients...!  (And here we thought the eggs were carried in the female's mouth while being fertilized by the male...! Maybe some petty eggheads don't even know what they're talking about... EH?) while the ever-horrific looking Angler Fish latches on to its female, parasite-style!  The male octopus simply makes a ritualistic sacrifice of its penis: it falls off during mating! (But it grows back - fear not, Topo!)  And things quickly get all down the tube from that point on, with less privacy and a permanent set of peeping toms standing by, when the fishies have to do it inside a fish tank, of course...! But that's another story - another aquamusing story, kind of! 

Regardless of any and all refinements and specificities concerning the nature of these rituals and the variety of necessary components, it is undeniable that attracting a female's attention requires much work and time, no matter what species you are, under the sea or above the surface...!

We know what we are talking about when we call them Aquaficionadas - see?  

;-)

UPDATE:

DAMNABLE YAHOO...@$!#%

HERE IS THE DARN VIDEO - TIMES 10: