Pretty cute, huh? A little boy found it (dead) on the beach of the CT Audubon Coastal Center and brought it to Twan. Twan brought it here, and Greg Watkins-Colwell of our division along with Karsten Hartel of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology identified it.
It's a porcupinefish of the species Chilomycterus schoepfi (common name striped burrfish). Here's what these guys look like as adults (photo from here):
If you think it looks like a pufferfish, you're right. It acts like a pufferfish too-- it can inflate its body to ward off predators, and it's toxic just like a pufferfish. But it turns out it's not actually a pufferfish. It belongs to a very closely related family known as the porcupinefishes (family Diodontidae), as I alluded to earlier in the post.
For more on our new little specimen, the CT Audubon Society has blogged about it in more detail here.
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