Incredibly, there was no common ancestor of these 16 Vantafish species, or at least the 16 that Osborn and Davis have discovered. up to this point“That he developed this trick and passed it on to his evolutionary descendants.” The species evolved independently, so they have slightly different ways of absorbing light; Their melanosomes are arranged differently on the skin.
“Some of them are in great confusion,” says Osborn. “Some of them have three layers, some of them have two layers. Some of them have really thick layers, some of them have thinner layers. So there are these little, little differences in how they did it between different species. “
The skin of all of these fish is specifically tuned to absorb blue and green light, which are the colors of most bioluminescence at depth. But the species are using their ultra blackness for various purposes, either as the prey that hides from the hunters, or as the hunters that hides from the prey. Interestingly, one of the species, the rabid dragonfish, is only ultra black as a juvenile. Why? Because small, helpless babies need to hide from predators. As adults, once the dragonfish extends to more than a foot in length, they don’t have much to hide, they are further up the food chain.
And understand this: The researchers found that some species had ultra-black intestinal linings, which likely prevent them from shining like flashlights when they eat bioluminescent prey. “Either he’ll be startled and bioluminescent when he’s in his stomach because he’s going crazy, or when he digests it, those chemicals will break free and start bioluminescent,” says Osborn. “You don’t want to swim with a glowing belly, do you? That’s just asking for trouble. “
You also don’t want to swim with a empty belly. A coral reef is filled with masses of fish, offering predators many options on the menu. But in the vastness of the depths, the prey is relatively sparse, making predators much more pressure to get a meal. “Ultra-black seems extreme, why would they spend so much energy and evolutionary time to do that?” asks Luiz Rocha, a fish curator at the California Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in this research. “If they weren’t so ultra black, they would still be relatively invisible. And I think the reason is because there is so little prey that they have to be very efficient, to the point where they can catch almost 100 percent of whatever they come in contact with. them. Because if they don’t, they will starve. ” Other peculiarities of its morphology also betray this despair: species like monkfish have huge mouths and bellies, all the better to consume what they find in the dark.
These fish have developed a fascinating type of hybrid approach to ultra-blackness. Consider the ultra black birds of paradise. For starters, its feathers are darkly pigmented, but they also use small tree-like structures that bounce light and absorb more photons. In contrast, Vantafish’s many species use a 2-in-1 approach to absorb light just as effectively: melanosomes are the pigment and The structure that eats all that light. “It makes all of this so much simpler,” says Davis. “So if you were trying to imitate it for any kind of technological purpose, now you only need to make one component.”
By contrast, ultra-black man-made materials use carbon nanotubes, small cylinders that trap photons, which are difficult to manufacture. “You end up with quite a fragile material, an incredibly black material, but a fragile one,” says Davis. “Here we are basically seeing that a random aggregation of nanoparticles is producing something that is almost as black.” There is no special structural alignment you need. In theory, if you can make nanoparticles the right size and shape, then you should be able to coat anything with it. ”
No one has queued to market Vantafish’s dark magic. But perhaps the ultra-black materials of the future can only be superficial.
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