• Question: humans have bioluminescence?

    Asked by 326nepk48 to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 13 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Yo Yehudi

      Yo Yehudi answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      hmmm, if you google it, some answers come up suggesting humans kind of can be bioluminescent, but it’s not exactly something you see every day…. did you know there are bio-engineered glow in the dark zebrafish though? I think that’s totally amazing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GloFish >> see, science is cool 😉

    • Photo: Kerrianne Harrington

      Kerrianne Harrington answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      They do :O ? I’ll have to admit my imagination of what creatures have bioluminescence is limited to weird jellyfish and fireflies. As a physicist, when I think of bioluminescence, what I think of is a living organism that has a chemical reaction that can give off light. As to what living organisms do this, I’m a little fuzzy! The important bit for me would be the light, and some of the chemistry.

      I had a little dig through google, and was not expecting to be able to find the journal source for the popular science reporting articles so easily! That’s a nice change. Yay for The Guardian (article I looked at is here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/jul/17/human-bioluminescence )! Sometimes it can be a pain to find the source.

      Apparently it is very, very weak, and happens because of metabolic reactions.

      The publication relevant to that is here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0006256 It looks like some good science, with a fair amount of citations (this tells us people have wanted to talk about it in their own publications). It is open access if you wanted to browse it, but The Guardian article looks like it summarizes it very well. It looks like you’ve taught me something I didn’t know today 🙂

    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      Kerrianne, that article is an absolutely unbelievable find! The first sentence of the summary is ‘the human body literally glimmers’!!!! :O :O :O (Shame it goes on to call it ‘ultraweak’.)
      I don’t think humans generally do bioluminesce to a visible level, but lots of other living things do, and we can make them do it (https://youtu.be/9HXXQBz6Vv0?t=1m35s). (Be warned, this might now become a list of links to videos of bioluminescence!) One of the most amazing programmes I’ve watched in recent years was David Attenborough’s Life That Glows (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07bgpft/clips) – it was absolutely staggering and utterly beautiful. It showcased things like the little shrimpy ostracod lighting up when a fish swallowed it (so it got spat out, http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/28838200). And then there were the rays swooping through bioluminescent water in Blue Planet 2’s first episode the other week (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05l71vs)…
      I honestly think bioluminescence might be one of the most beautiful things in nature – you can read/see more about it here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/21011428) or here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/adaptations/Bioluminescence)

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