Bite-size Creachurs: Yellow Boxfish!

These guys weren't there :-(

Let’s talk about the Yellow Boxfish!

These spotted yellow sugar cubes are tropical fish from the Indo-West Pacific waters, where they inhabit coral reefs.

Their name comes from their cuboid shape (obviously lol). They have an armoured, rigid body with prominent horns and a stumpy appearance, which makes them look like boxes with tiny, super fast fins. When they're babies (like in the picture), you can't even tell they have fins at all!

And you might think oddly-shaped fish are all slow swimmers — I mean, we did just talk about the Ocean Sunfish — but Boxfish are actually quite fast!

They have what is known as a carapace, which is simply a hard growth that protects the softer parts of an animal's body, for example, a turtle's shell. 

To achieve such a shape of body armour, Boxfish lost several bones usually found in bony fish (the first spiny dorsal fin including all associated pterygiophores, which are the bones that support said the dorsal fin, the pelvic fin complex, and pleural ribs) and fused a bunch of their ribs and abdominal bones, and then learned to adapt to said shape to swim without issue.

The carapace's shape actually plays a role in the Boxfish swimming due to the fact that they evolved a particular style of swimming called ostraciiform locomotion, which allows their bodies to minimize drag and DASH away from predators. 

As you can see in this nifty fish locomotion GIF, ostraciiform locomotion is less ondular when compared to other forms of travel from different sea creatures. The Boxfish recieved extra help from its fins to make up for the lackluster range of movements from its tail and body.

Actually, their weird shape does more than just turning them into speed devils: often puzzles biologists: currently, Boxfishes are classified into two families, the Aracanidae (deepwater boxfishes), and the Ostraciidae (boxfishes, cowfishes and trunkfishes).

These little friends of the yellow variety are proudly Ostraciidae!

They're usually pretty solitary animals, hunting (they're omnivorous, consuming both marine algae and smaller creatures like sponges, crustaceans, and tiny fish) and feeding alone, and only ever come in contact with their own species when in mating season, which comes about in spring.

As you might have guessed by their bright colouring, these cuties can be pretty toxic! If threatened, they release the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin (TTX, the same one found in Fugu) from their skin, which kills nearby predators.

They might look like cheese cubes, but no munching on them! Unless you want to trip balls and die!

Oh, and one more thing before I send off this entry!

Look familiar?

Well, this is a Mercedes-Benz Bionic, a concept car first showcased in the 2005 DaimlerChrysler Innovation Symposium in Washington, D. C — and it was indeed inspired by our friend the Yellow Boxfish!

Designers thought that, because the fish are pretty darn fast, their odd shaped just had to be somehow aerodynamic, and they implemented it to the model in hopes of reducing drag and creating a pretty fast ride with less nitrogen oxide emissions.

However; we know that the Boxfish aren't actually aerodynamic, and their speed is actually a byproduct of evolutionary adaptations and ostraciiform locomotion.

So

I guess you can figre out why it never became more than a concept.