ABOVE: The swell shark (Cephaloscyllium ventriosum) glows a bright green under blue-filtered light.
DAVID GRUBER
Small-molecule metabolites in sharks’ skin help the creatures stand out against the dark ocean floor by glowing bright green, researchers reported August 8 in iScience.
Swell sharks (Cephaloscyllium ventriosum) and chain catsharks (Scyliorhinus retifer) can only see light in the blue-green spectrum, the dominant colors found in their deep-sea habitat. Both sharks sport light and dark patterns on their skin, and in the eyes of a fellow shark, the pale patches gleam a fluorescent green. Scientists found that this lighter skin contains a previously unknown family of small-molecule metabolites, derived from the amino acid tryptophan, which emit green light in response to blue.
“The exciting part of this study is the description of an entirely new form of marine biofluorescence from sharks,” says coauthor David Gruber, a...
H.B. Park et al., “Bright-green biofluorescence in sharks derives from bromo-kynurenine metabolism,” doi:10.1016/j.isci.2019.07.019, iScience, 2019.
Nicoletta Lanese is an intern at The Scientist. Email her at nlanese@the-scientist.com.
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