How elephant seals use bioluminescence to hunt in the dark

If you ’re an aquatic mammal , how do you hunt in the dour seas , where light ca n’t penetrate ? dolphin have it soft with their echolocation , but what about the other fauna with much more limited sense ? They dog after critters that put up their own light .

In a paper publishedin the daybook PLOS One , investigator describe how they tracked four female southerly elephant seals ( Mirounga leonina ) as they hunted , recording the metre , deepness , and clear levels . In case where the light was recorded as brighter than ambient degree , the seals were near sources of bioluminescence — and would n’t you know it , that was when they foraged more .

The seal have eyes unambiguously tuned to observe light at 485 nm , the same wavelength as the bioluminescence of the lantern fish that make up much of their quarry . While it may seem ego - evident that a recondite sea dive marauder would go after prey that glows in the dark , this is some of the first strong grounds show that this does materialise .

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It also hint at a whole humanity of other possibilities — the sensors on the seal were only capable of registering unclouded levels every two seconds , and could only detect the brilliant flash lamp that some animals create , rather than soft gleaming . There was also no way to flat bond the seals ’ depredation to specific prey species or the many others that can bioluminesce . The researchers also noted that some species of runt and squid will eject cloud of bioluminescent textile to distract predator that focalize on the glow .

The seals are also perfectly capable of hunting animals that do n’t beam , suggesting they have other tools at their disposal , too . It ’s a outre and glowing world in the depth , and this takes us one step nearer to understanding how it functions .

figure by Mirounga_leonina.jpg : Butterfly voyages – Serge Ouachéederivative work : Ilmari Karonen ( Mirounga_leonina.jpg ) [ CC - BY - SA-3.0 - 2.5 - 2.0 - 1.0orGFDL],via Wikimedia Commons

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