Diodon - Defense Mechanisms

Defense Mechanisms

• Like pufferfishes they can inflate themselves, making their spines stand perpendicular to the skin. When inflated they pose a major difficulty to their predators: a large diodon fully inflated can choke a shark to death. According to Charles Darwin in The Voyage Of the Beagle (1845), Darwin was told by a Doctor Allen of Forres, UK that the Diodon actually had been found "floating alive and distended, in the stomach of the shark" and had been known to chew its way out of shark bodies after being swallowed, causing the death of its attacker.
• They may be poisonous, through the accumulation of tetrodotoxin or ciguatera.