A new study suggests that the first animal that glowed in the dark was a coral that lived deep in the ocean about half a billion years ago.
This image provided by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in April 2024 shows bioluminescence in the sea whip coral Funiculina sp. observed under red light in a laboratory. Most animals that light up are found in the depths of the ocean and they might have been doing it longer than thought.
Some use light to startle predators, “like a burglar alarm," and others use it to lure prey, as anglerfish do, said Quattrini, who is curator of corals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.Many deep-sea soft coral species light up briefly when bumped — or when stroked with a paintbrush.
“For some species, the whole body glows — for others, only parts of their branches will glow,” said Danielle DeLeo, a study co-author and evolutionary marine biologist at the Smithsonian. That date is around 270 million years before the previously earliest known example: a glowing prehistoric shrimp. It also places the origin of light production to around the time of the Cambrian explosion, when life on Earth evolved and diversified rapidly — giving rise to many major animal groups that exist today.
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