Ancestors of so-called soft corals may have developed bioluminescence in the earliest days of deep-ocean living
The more humans have explored the deep oceans, the more examples we’ve found of animals with a seemingly magical talent:Bioluminescence is surprisingly common, with various mechanisms having evolved perhaps around 100 separate times over the course of hundreds of millions of years.
For animals, especially those that live deeper in the ocean than sunlight can reach, bioluminescence can make the difference between life and death: for example, it can lure prey and deter predators. Biologists are still working to understand the full scope of the phenomenon’s uses.
Still, zoologist Andrea Quattrini, curator of corals at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and her colleagues were determined to understand how—and when—bioluminescence may have developed in octocorals. Quattrini has spent about a decade testing living octocorals collected from the ocean by sequestering the creatures under a blanket or in a dark room and nudging them with a pair of laboratory tweezers, looking for signs of light.
Quattrini and her colleagues next plan to analyze the gene that builds luciferase, the protein responsible for bioluminescence in octocorals. The same gene shows up in both bioluminescent and nonbioluminescent octocorals, she says, so the researchers want to understand how some of the animals seem to have lost the ability to light up.
This kind of work helps to paint a better picture of what the ecosystems of the ancient Earth—which seem so alien to us today—may have looked like. “Imagine the ocean where coral emit light and carnivorous predators have large eyes in midnight water,” Oba says. “Life is wonderful.”
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