However, its UV component causes DNA damage. Sunlight is a primary source of energy for life. I’m thinking about a 2003 paper: ‘The coevolution of blue-light photoreception and circadian rhythms.’ Not a perfect fit with biofluorescence, but there’s something here I can’t quite put my finger on about UV light, oceans…Ībstract. So…I’m sure there’s more than one dissertation to be written on the subject, but the better ones are going to be more along the lines of explaining why we don’t see fluorescence rather than explaining the very weak fluorescence we do see. But fluorescence would add an over-the-top dimension to those already-colorful organisms, something that would be even more strongly selected for than the existing bright coloration. At the same time, we’ve got lots of species, especially birds, that are all about the showy and the colorful…and they don’t use fluorescence to do so. Yet none of these animals that fluoresce do so anywhere near as brightly nor as colorfully. ![]() You can go to your local office supply store and buy pens and paper that fluoresce pretty strongly. So…I’m guessing that the fluorescence is entirely irrelevant in the turtle’s case it just so happens that the pigmentation fluoresces when subjected to UV light that the turtle never swims into.Ī big problem, perhaps an insurmountable hurdle, for any proposal that fluorescence is adaptive…is that there are few, if any, natural environments where UV light predominates to the extent that fluorescence is responsible for more than a marginal amount of the visual appearance. But the fluorescent patterns match the visible light patterns, which means that it’s the patterning that contains the fluorescence, not something else laid on top of the patterning that’s fluorescing. This beautiful turtle’s fluorescent marking is highly patterened, which makes it striking. Think of the last time you saw a disco or the like with blacklights and how everything looked different. Those underwater scenes only look so striking because the photographers are pointing insanely bright artificial UV blacklights at them. UV light is quickly attenuated under water, as I recall, so I doubt that undersea organisms gain any advantage to fluorescence. All that UV light you can’t see is reemitted as visible light.įirst, fluorescence mostly requires UV light. And, of course, all those fluorescent orange and green and pink and what-not papers and inks and plastics…they really do fluoresce, which is why they look so bright. Scorpions are well known for fluorescing. Your own skin is weakly fluorescent, though I’m not sure how much of that is due to skin cells and how much to bacteria. ![]() ![]() …but it’s worth noting that fluorescence is very common, all around us, in both animate and inanimate objects.
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