Birds-of-paradise are a stunning example of natural bright colors — and no, we’re not talking about the plant. A recent study out of the American Museum of Natural History found the shades and hues on these flights of fancy aren’t just feather-deep.
Dr. Rene Martin is a fish biologist by trade, and normally focuses on bioluminescence, where a living thing produces light itself… but was approached by a colleague to investigate biofluorescence, where an organism absorbs one high wavelength of light and re-emits it as a lower one. “A great thing about being at a museum of such caliber and size is that you get to know all of the different curators and different departments,” she offers. “Not only do they have every species, but they have multiple specimens of species, because their collection goes back hundreds of years.”
We’ve seen many glowing discoveries in the animal kingdom in this decade alone, from platypuses in Chicago to Tasmanian devils in Toledo. Dr. Martin’s methodology was similar: “You’re opening drawers of birds, you’re shining a light at them, and you have filter goggles on that kind of reduce the blue excitation light, so you can really only see any other color that comes back. There are 45 different species of birds-of-paradise, and I was able to analyze all of the species… and of those, 37 of them are biofluorescent, so a huge majority of them are.”
The team hypothesizes that showy glow helps in reproductive displays, but that’s not the case for every creature, helping with anything from communication to camouflage. Dr. Martin draws on her regular line of work: “When we think about fish, oftentimes corals will be brightly-colored and biofluorescent, and the fish will also be brightly-colored and biofluorescent… so there’s different reasons these organisms do it.”
Some research suggests 4 key boxes to check off to say an organism is using that fluorescence for a purpose: emission, absorption, location on the body, and spectral sensitivity, or how sensitive your eyes are to the wavelength being put out. These birds-of-paradise seem to tick all 4, including in their mouths as well as their plumage.
“It’s hard to determine that in museum specimens, because oftentimes they’re prepped with the mouth closed with cotton stuffed in them,” Dr. Martin explains. “I was able to open their mouths a little bit, shine that light in, and get biofluorescent readings from them.”
Dr. Martin offers that taking one tack in your career doesn’t preclude you from another. “You can take a path and end up working on one particular group — in my case, fish and deep-sea fish — but it doesn’t negate you from having the ability to look at all these cool different groups. There’s all sorts of hidden mysteries that you can find, even in a group that’s really well-studied.
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This article was published by WTVG on 2025-03-11 13:42:00
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