The Red Sea is a treasure chest full of natural treasures , as the thousands of divers from all over the world who come to its claim know well, but there are still surprises to discover . This is demonstrated by the unusual finding made by an international team of biologists and reported in the journal PLOS ONE .
These are tiny luminous creatures detected while the experts explored with infrared lights biodiversity of the coral reefs of the Farasan Islands , archipelago of Saudi Arabia.
These “fluorescent lanterns” –as their discoverers have defined them– emit a greenish luminescence and form colonies on the shells of gastropod mollusks of the Nassarius margaritifer species, small conches – between 20 and 25 millimeters long – that are buried in marine sediments during the day and surface to hunt invertebrates at night.
The researchers think that the new creatures are hydrozoans, probably of the genus Cytaeis, which are grouped in the form of jellyfish or – the case at hand – polyps. What they are not clear about is why the symbiosis between bioluminescent beings and mollusks occurs .
As for the shine, which appears around its mouth, it probably has the function of attracting prey. It seems that these “flashes” would be spotted by invertebrates (the victims of hydrozoans) at specific times: at dusk, dawn and on nights with a full moon.
In recent times, fluorescent animals have attracted the attention of the scientific community, who are trying to take advantage of this innate ability to generate light with medical applications . In fact, the Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien and the Japanese Osamu Shimomura jointly won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP , isolated from the Aequorea victoria jellyfish. Thanks to genetic manipulation techniques, GFP can be introduced into a living cell to visualize its behavior .
