Karen Osborn, Smithsonian Institution
- A team of scientists have figured out how deep sea fish manage to essentially disappear from sight in order to evade predators.
- A new paper describes how several fish can absorb almost all light emitted by bioluminescent deep sea creatures thanks to specialized melanosomes.
The oceanic abyss is home to some of the gnarliest creatures on Earth. But slowly the amazing biological secrets of these deep sea fish, who live most of their lives in near total darkness, is slowly coming to light.
A new study published in Current Biology reveals that ultra-black fish—including Poromitra crassiceps, Idiacanthus antrostomus, and Anoplogaster cornuta—have the ability to absorb nearly all of the light that touches their skin. According to the researchers, including scientists from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and Duke University, these fish “can reduce the sighting distance of visual predators more than 6-fold compared to fish with two percent reflectance.”
The fish are able to absorb almost all light thanks to a combination of what the researchers call super absorptive scattering particles, which could help inspire the creation of ultra-black materials for modern applications.
The team estimates that these ultra-black deep sea fish have the ability to absorb 99.5 percent of all light that they encounter. Karen Osborn, a zoologist with the Smithsonian who worked on the research, says that it made no difference what type of advanced equipment was used and no matter “how you set up the camera or lighting,” the deep sea fish “just sucked up all the light.”
Soon Osborn and team discovered what made it so difficult to capture any viable photos of the fish: they were ultra-black. Think blacker than the darkest black you’ve ever seen. Highly reflective, mirrored surfaces might be helpful camouflage for sea animals who dwell near the surface, but for deep-sea creatures, a spark of bioluminescent lighting against a reflective surface—like fish scales—could be the difference between remaining safely hidden and being discovered by a hungry predator.
In their paper, the researchers describe how pigmentation aids the fish in absorbing the light emitted by bioluminescent sources, “rendering them visually undetectable.” The researchers found that this camouflage is likely made possible by “a continuous layer of densely packed melanosomes [pigments which give tissue color and help with photoreception] in the exterior-most layer of the dermis.” The melanosomes are arranged in both size and shape to minimize the amount of light that gets reflected off of them.
The news release reveals that these fish are so good at light absorption “that even in bright light they appear to be silhouettes with no discernible features. In the darkness of the ocean, even surrounded by bioluminescent light, they literally disappear.”
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