Fanta fish gelatin10/30/2023 ![]() ![]() You also don't want to be swimming around with an empty belly. “You don't want to be swimming around with a glowing belly, right? That's just asking for trouble.” “It's either going to be startled and bioluminescent when it's in your belly because it's freaking out, or as you digest it, those chemicals are going to release and start bioluminescing,” says Osborn. As adults, once the threadfin dragonfish grow to over a foot long, they don’t have so much to hide from-they’re higher up the food chain.Īnd get this: The researchers found some species had ultra-black gut linings, likely to keep them from glowing like lanterns when they eat bioluminescent prey. Why? Because tiny, defenseless babies need to hide from predators. Interestingly, one of the species, the threadfin dragonfish, is only ultra-black as a juvenile. But the species are using their ultra-blackness for diverse purposes, either as the prey hiding themselves from hunters, or as the hunters hiding themselves from prey. The skin of all of these fishes is specifically tuned to absorb blue and green light, which are the colors of the majority of bioluminescence in the deep. So there's these little, little differences in how they've actually accomplished this between the different species.” Some of them have really thick layers, some of them have thinner layers. “Some of them have three layers, some of them have two layers. “Some of them have just a big jumble,” says Osborn. The species evolved it independently, so they have slightly different ways of going about absorbing light their melanosomes are arranged differently in the skin. ![]() Incredibly, there wasn’t one common ancestor of these 16 Vantafish species-or at least the 16 that Osborn and Davis have discovered so far-that evolved this trick and passed it along to its evolutionary descendants. “Once it comes in, it bounces around between all of those little balls and doesn't come back out.” “It's kind of like a gumball machine, where all of the gumballs inside are the right size and shape to trap light within the machine,” adds Davis. “And so what they've done is create this super-efficient, very-little-material system where they can basically build a light trap with just the pigment particles and nothing else.” “But what isn't absorbed side-scatters into the layer, and it's absorbed by the neighboring pigments that are all packed right up close to it,” says Osborn. When you shine a light on a fangtooth or its peers, the melanosomes absorb most of the photons right away. Tons of melanin alone, though, couldn’t make these fish rival the darkness of Vantablack. The skin of these fishes is positively packed with a layer of organelles called melanosomes, themselves loaded with melanin. So how do these 16 species of ultra-black fish camouflage themselves so well? It’s all about melanin, the same stuff that gives us humans our skin coloration. “How is it that I can shine two strobe lights at them and all that light just disappears?”įrom an invisible gecko to a blorpie fish, these atypical animals are a testament to natural selection. “I had tried to take pictures of deep-sea fish before and got nothing but these really horrible pictures, where you can't see any detail,” she says. This wasn’t her first photo shoot with a deep-sea fish, so it couldn’t be operator error. “I was trying to take pictures of it, and I was just getting these silhouettes,” Osborn says. ![]() Yet when she put the fangtooth in front of the camera, it turned into a living black hole-the outline was there, but not the fine details, as if the fish was devouring light. Using her custom-built system of strobe lights and a camera mounted above a tank, she could capture the rare specimen for science. Osborn got her hands on a fangtooth, a self-explanatory creature with a mouth full of nasty, big, pointy teeth, attached to a stout, teardrop-shaped body. Bobbing along on the research vessel Western Flyer just outside California’s Monterey Bay, marine biologist Karen Osborn and her colleagues were hauling deep-sea fish to the surface for cataloging and a photo shoot.
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