This is the first time ultra-black coloration has been found in aquatic animals. In a paper published in “Current Biology,” Osborn and coauthors Sönke Johnsen and Alexander Davis from Duke University describe how the structure and arrangement of melanosomes render 16 species of fishes ultra-black, meaning they absorb at least 99.5 percent of light that hits them, and allows them to appear virtually invisible in the darkness of the deep sea. Osborn struggled to take a detailed photo of the Anoplogaster cornuta.
Sea fishes full#
The cells were full to overflowing with melanosomes tightly packed in. But the fishes Osborn looked at had so many cells that they created a continuous layer right at the surface of the skin.
Sea fishes skin#
In most fishes, the cells are in deeper layers of the skin and scattered around with space between them.
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The pigment, melanin, is also found in our skin, squid ink and many other places. These capsules are called melanosomes, and they hold pigment, which absorbs light and makes the fish appear dark brown to black. “It was really weird, not like normal fish skin.”įish skin is layered and has cells that hold pigment in cellular components, or capsules. “Every fish that I looked at had a similar shape, amount and location of the pigment in their skin,” Osborn said. Perplexed, she began to periodically collect tissue samples from the fishes and examine them with light and electron microscopy. Instead, the fishes appeared as black silhouettes, absorbing any light she pointed at them. But over the years, she noticed something odd-while trying to take pictures of certain deep-sea fishes, she couldn’t capture any details, no matter what she tried. She’s an experienced photographer of marine life and frequently uses the photos for outreach at the museum. While out collecting invertebrates for research, Karen Osborn, a research zoologist and curator at the National Museum of Natural History and adjunct scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, often finds extra creatures in her trawl net and takes pictures of the ones that catch her eye.
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