Thursday June 20, 2024
PhysOrg —
A team of zoologists and marine biologists affiliated with several institutions in Indonesia, working with a colleague from Germany, has discovered previously unknown instances of fluorescence in 27 marine creatures.
In their paper published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the group describes their search for fluorescence in marine creatures over the course of three years in both the Red Sea and the Banda Sea.
Prior research has shown that some marine creatures have bioluminescence, which is the ability to produce light. Other creatures have something else, called fluorescence, where all or parts of them shine brighter than normal when certain types of light are focused on them.
In this new study, the research team used a “Sola” light source, which is used for illuminating targets of microscopy, to find fluorescence in sea creatures.