In new research published in Current Biology on Thursday, scientists looked at 16 species of deep sea animals that can absorb more than 99.5 percent of visible light directed at them, making them some of the darkest known animals.
, a graduate student at Duke University who co-authored the paper and worked on modeling skin cell structures.
“In a pitch black ocean, you don’t have to worry necessarily about light from the sun,” says Davis, “but you do have to worry about animals that have searchlights, or little photophores on their heads that shine out and help hunt for prey, or species of prey that may spew out bioluminescent liquid to try and mark you.” Capturing those stray beams of light and hiding them away helps these fish escape becoming dinner—and helps them sneak up on dinner.
These traits born of convergent evolution, when two unrelated animals develop similar adaptations, function similarly even at a microscopic level, she explains. Their skin tends to look very different from those of other fish—their melanin is densely packed into a super thin layer of cells near the very outside of the skin. It’s a pretty unusual structure, since most fish have several dermal layers above and below their layer of pigmentation.
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