Researchers discover more than 180 species of glowing, biofluorescent fish

Biofluorescence — the ability to glow in neon hues under blue or black light — isn't anything new to scientists, or to the rest of us really, but a team of researchers has discovered that this ability may be even more common in nature, and more varied, than we ever thought.

"By designing scientific lighting that mimics the ocean's light along with cameras that can capture the animals' fluorescent light, we can now catch a glimpse of this hidden biofluorescent universe," said David Gruber, one of the lead authors of the paper who teaches biology at Baruch College and is a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, according to an AMNH statement.

The image to the right is just one example of this biofluorescence in action. This fish, called a triplefin blennie, is shown under white light in the top photograph, and under blue light in the bottom photograph.

The glowing markings in the bottom picture are completely invisible to human eyes, but at the depths these fish live at — where all of the visible light and anything lower-energy than it has been completely filtered out by the seawater — the bottom picture is very likely what every other fish that lives at that depth is able to see. The patterns the biofluorescence creates on these fish probably serve the same purpose as colourful markings and stripes on land animals — for communication, mating and camouflage.

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"The cryptically-patterned gobies, flatfishes, eels, and scorpionfishes — these are animals that you'd never normally see during a dive," said John Sparks, co-lead author of the research paper and curator in the AMNH's Department of Ichthyology, according to a press release. "To our eyes, they blend right into their environment. But to a fish that has a yellow intraocular filter, they must stick out like a sore thumb."

With this paper being the first to look at the widespread distribution of these biofluorescent fishes, the researchers say that it opens up new areas of research. Also, just as the discovery of green fluorescent proteins in jellyfish in the '60s led to revolutions in biological and medical research, uncovering the wide variety of biofluorescence in nature may make even more of these proteins available.

Their findings have been published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

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