Marine biologist Karen Osborn just got her hands on a fish with a mouth “full of nasty, big, pointy teeth”. Realizing that this fangtooth was a rare specimen, she decided to document the fish using her camera. When she got the pictures, however, she realized that what she only got were terrible silhouettes. What’s going on?
This wasn’t her first photo shoot with a deep-sea fish, so it couldn’t be operator error. But wait a second, Osborn figured. “I had tried to take pictures of deep-sea fish before and got nothing but these really horrible pictures, where you can't see any detail,” she says. “How is it that I can shine two strobe lights at them and all that light just disappears?”
It disappears because the fangtooth, along with 15 other species that Osborn and her colleagues have found so far, camouflage themselves with “ultra-black” skin, the deep-sea version of Vantablack, the famous human-made material that absorbs almost all the light you shine at it. These fish have evolved a different and devilishly clever way of going ultra-black with incredible efficiency: One species the researchers found absorbs 99.956 percent of the light that hits it, making it nearly as black as Vantablack.
What makes the skins of these sea creatures ultra-black, and why did they evolve like this? Answers over at Wired.
(Image Credit: Karen Osborn/ Smithsonian/ Wired)
Newest 1 Comment
vantablack is the best black
Abusive comment hidden.
(Show it anyway.)