Tiny fish build ocean floor masterpieces

This tiny fish works for a whole week to make giant sand art

By Smartasaurus· 2 min read Curious

Two-metre-wide, perfectly symmetrical geometric circles appearing out of nowhere on the seafloor

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The short version

This tiny fish works for a whole week to make giant sand art
Females swim over and inspect the design.
There are coral reefs full of fish doing strange beautiful things humans have never seen, in water too deep or too remote to film.

Divers off the coast of Japan kept finding the same impossible thing on the seafloor: perfectly symmetrical circles, two metres across, carved into the sand with mathematical precision.

For decades nobody knew what made them. They appeared overnight. No artist. No tools. No evidence of anything large enough to make them.

In 2014, a researcher finally filmed the culprit. A pufferfish about 12 centimetres long. Smaller than your hand.

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