The courtship display drawing of a Pufferfish is falsely labelled Sudarshana Chakra - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
August 4, 2023
A video claiming that a Silverfish has drawn the Sudarshana Chakra at the bottom of the sea is doing the rounds on social media. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: A video of a silverfish drawing the Sudarshana Chakra on the sea floor.
Fact: White-spotted male pufferfish draw these circular shapes on the seabed to attract females. The grains of sand in the centre of this shape are very delicate. After the female fish meets the male fish, she lays her eggs in this fine sand and leaves. The male fish guards the eggs until they hatch. Hence, the claim made in the post is misleading.
Firstly, using relevant keywords, we searched the internet to learn more details about this video. Through this search, we found that it is a video clip from a BBC documentary called ‘Life Story’, which came out in 2014. According to the details in this documentary, a male fish, known as the ‘Japanese PufferFish’, draws such shapes with their fins in the sand on the seabed to attract and ‘win a mate’. This is a courtship display.
Nature, the National Library of Medicine, and other research papers concluded in 2013 that white-spotted male puffer fish draw such patterns. Although such shapes were spotted in the sea a as early as 1995, how they formed was not known. Male pufferfishes draw these circular shapes in 7-9 days. The grains of sand in the centre of this shape are very delicate. After the female fish meets the male fish, she lays her eggs in this fine sand and leaves. The male fish guards the eggs until they hatch.
To sum up, the courtship display drawing of a PufferFish is falsely labelled Sudarshana Chakra.