The Beginning

What if we humans can produce light too, we will be called as a superhuman or the next superhero. It feels so fascinating to be a superhero who illuminate in night and produce light from its body but have you ever wandered the deep seas animals who produce light, how can they actually emit the magical glow? What makes them to produce blue, green or red lights underwater?

The answer for all the question is Bioluminescence, before explaining what is it lets get onboard with the story of “The Light of The Seas”.

Bioluminescence overview

What is it about bioluminescence that we find so mesmerizing? Light, after all, is abundant. Each morning, an immense bowl of sunshine lifts itself above the trees and rooftops, above birds and mountains, and spills its golden rays. Sunlight washes over the continents and oceans, dripping down forest canopies and pooling in valleys and deserts; it splashes silently across farms and cities; it slips into our bedrooms, seeps beneath our skin, and tunnels through our eyes to illuminate the rostrum of the mind. Yet we can’t seem to urge enough light, or feel close enough to that. Throughout history, many cultures have told stories of individuals and beings wreathed with halos or imbued with an irrepressible brilliance: gods, angels, fairies, saints, and jinns. To be infused with light is to be divine or supernatural, precisely because it’s an impossibility for us.

Failing to summon light from within, we found other ways to come up with and control it, to stay it nearby even within the Sun’s absence: we tamed fire and channelled electricity; we learned to fling bombs of color against the veil of night and line our roofs with gleaming drops of rainbow; we devised powerful beacons that might be summoned at the flip of a switch and erected shining pillars along our streets. Today, some people are even willing to stitch LEDs beneath their skin so as to backlight tattoos, or just for sheer novelty. But it’s all pretentious. Despite our slick technology, we’ve got never truly matched the ostracod or firefly. We cannot equal their intuitive mastery of illumination. Light is woven into their very biology during a way we’ve got never known. “For an organism to create light, especially to own a giant display of sunshine, seems to us sort of a superpower,” Haddock says.

There were ingenious applications for bioluminescence, many of which are little known today. Roman naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote that one could rub the slime of a particular luminous jellyfish, possibly Pelagia noctiluca, onto a walking persist that make it double as a torch. within the late 17th century, the physician Georg Eberhard Rumphius described indigenous peoples of Indonesia using bioluminescent fungi as flashlights within the forest. And before the 19th century, coal miners filled jars with fireflies, furthermore as dried fish skin crawling with bioluminescent bacteria, to function lanterns; the security lamp had not yet been invented and carrying an open flame into a cave risked igniting explosive gas.

So, with perhaps insufficient gratitude, we adapted the incomparable talents of glowing creatures for our own purposes. We borrowed their light and it revealed things about our own biology we would never have discovered otherwise. But that’s all we will do—borrow. We cannot be them, so we seek them out, and draw them near us—every bit as mesmerized as once we thought the Sun had impregnated the ocean. to the current day, we cup them in our hands, collect them in jars, and place them on our nightstand, forever trying to satisfy our hunger.

Bioluminescence is so commonplace on our planet— particularly within the oceans—that scientists estimate the thousands of glowing species they need catalogued to this point are just a fraction of the sum. it should somewhat be that the overwhelming majority of deep-sea creatures, which live beyond the Sun’s reach, generate their own light (sometimes with the help of microbes). They use these innate glows primarily to communicate: to warn and frighten, hide and hunt, lure and beguile. Bioluminescence is one amongst the oldest and most prevalent languages on Earth—and one that’s largely alien to us. Despite our fantasies and mythologies, the reality is that there’s nothing supernatural about living light; it’s been an element of nature for eons. It’s just that we were denied this particular gift.