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Nature has no shortage of patterns, from spots on leopards to stripes on zebras and hexagons on boxfish.

It also gives them their strange shapes: other boxfish species look like purses, Frisbees or ottomans.

A sleeping boxfish draped like a noodle over a coral branch.

That includes an idea based on a fly swatter, another based on combining the shapes of a boxfish and manta ray and a third developed by a pair of Ph.D. students in aerospace engineering.

The boxfish uses its mouth to blow tiny jets of water into the sandy seabed, stirring up small invertebrates.