Pufferfish

If you're a Pufferfish

You are mild, a little awkward and underestimated, and you do not mind, because anyone who pushes it finds out. Under pressure you become a larger, rounder, spikier version of yourself and wait for the problem to leave. You are not fast. You are patient and detailed, and you build things most people never see.

The flesh of many pufferfish carries tetrodotoxin, a nerve poison far more lethal than cyanide, which the fish doesn't make itself but collects from bacteria in its food.

The Pufferfish as a spirit animal

You are gentle by default and dangerous by chemistry, which is a combination people only discover once. You don't go looking for conflict; you just make yourself impossible to swallow. The flaw is that inflating is exhausting and you hold the grudge the whole time you are round. A pufferfish is one of very few fish that can close its eyes, and it uses this mostly to avoid looking at you.

Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.

How to get along with a Pufferfish

When it goes wrong: A pufferfish under threat swells up and stays swollen until the danger goes; back off, lower the pressure and give it several minutes.

The Pufferfish in a relationship

You are shy and you make up for it with craftsmanship: your idea of courtship is building something elaborate and waiting to see who notices. You do not chase. Once someone has noticed, you are attentive and steady, and you guard the result more closely than anyone expects of something so round.

Best matchHedgehogBoth answer a threat by becoming larger and spikier and waiting for it to lose interest.

Handle with careSharkSharks are among the few animals that will try to swallow a pufferfish, and it rarely ends well for either party.

Field notes

Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works

Sociability

1

Boldness

3

Energy

2

Curiosity

5

Devotion

5

Roaming

1

• A pufferfish inflates by gulping water into its very elastic stomach; it is a last resort, and a tiring one.
• Its four front teeth are fused into a beak that never stops growing and must be worn down on hard food.
• Males of one Japanese species spend days sculpting large circular patterns in the sand to attract a mate.

Pufferfish in literature

• The fugu — haiku on fugu soup (ara nani tomo na ya), Matsuo Bashō (1678)
• The Diodon — The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin (1839)
• The river puffer — Evening Scene on a Spring River, Su Shi (1085)

Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.

Closest personalities

The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Pufferfish's. If you got Pufferfish, one of these was probably your runner-up.

• 

  Sloth97% alike

• 

  Axolotl93% alike

• 

  Chameleon92% alike

Other ocean

SharkOctopusJellyfishSeahorseSalmon

Among the 60

The Fishes of India, Francis Day (1878). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits