Vomiting Water Puffer Fish

Submission 19,391

About

Vomiting Water Puffer Fish refers to a photograph of a puffer fish that is spitting up water. The photograph elicited a series of reactions, from illustrations to visual comparisons.

Origin

On March 6th, 2019, the website tokyo-np.co.jp^[3] published an article entitled "Nontoxic puffer fish in hot spring water." The article included a photograph of the fish spitting up spring water (shown below).

Spread

Several days later, on March 10th, the Twitter^[4] account @oyakode_manaboo posted an image from the site and linked to the article. The post received more than 42,000 retweets and 81,000 likes in less than two weeks (shown below, left). Following the tweet, people began posting other images of animals, people or object spitting water (example below, center).

On March 14th, 2019, the stock photograph website Irasutoya posted an image of "illustration of a puffer fish" (shown below, right)^[1] They write in the image's description as "it is an illustration of a puffer fish that exhales seawater that was drawn to make the body look bigger."

That day, the website's Twitter ^[2] account tweeted a link to the image. The post received more than 28,000 retweets and 55,000 likes in one week.