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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 1: An Ocean Mystery

On Friday, July 8, 2005, scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute announced the discovery of a strange, jellyfish-type of sea creature. Located one mile below the surface of the ocean, this unusual creature became a new entry in the oceanographer’s record book. It represented the first marine creature known to attract potential food with red fluorescent light.

These still unnamed creatures are siphonophores, meaning that they are colonies of many organisms working together as a single unit. The organisms form a foot-long tube that is covered with tentacles. The stalk of each tentacle contains a light-emitting spot. According to the journal Science, each spot sends out blue-green light.

The same article states that certain chemicals in the stalk provide a resource for production of the blue-green light. As the spots emit this blue-green light, a fluorescent substance that has covered each spot absorbs that same blue-green light. Other chemicals within each stalk alter the energy in the emitted light, thus causing the release of a distinct, red light.

The red light lures smaller ocean life to the light-emitting spots. These small creatures get caught in the large tentacles that form part of the organism’s grouping. When this new sea creature senses the approach of potential food, other cells in this grouping of ocean-dwellers give-off a poisonous toxin. The toxin kills strange cells, leading to the capture and killing of many possible research tools.

Oceanographers expressed amazement at this new find. Until this past week, most scientists thought that sea creatures could not detect red light, and that no ocean creature could produce a red light. The scientists from Monterey Bay have proven that at least some of the creatures living in the sea can both detect and produce red light.

Now scientists must study how ocean-dwelling creatures can see the red light in the dark undersea world of the tentacle-covered, tubular, jellyfish-like bodies.

--Written by Sue Chehrenegar

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