When organisms biofluoresce, they absorb light, convert it, and send it back out as a different color.
“We’ve long known about biofluorescence underwater in organisms like corals,
jellyfish,
and even in land animals like butterflies and parrots, but fish
biofluorescence has been reported in only a few research publications,”
said study author
John Sparks,
a curator in the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of
Ichthyology. “This paper is the first to look at the wide distribution
of biofluorescence across fishes, and it opens up a number of new
research areas.”