flickering pictures

I think one day my love of alliteration is going to get me into trouble. Ten tons of terrible trouble.

Here’s a first-hand account from Puerto Rico’s Mosquito Bay, “one of the most bioluminescent bodies of water in the world,” with an eerie blue glowing effect created by tiny dinoflagellates. It was posted on Curious Expeditions, one of my very favourite sites. The Pink Tentacle photo above is from Japan, where tourists admire the day’s catch of sparkling enope squid, another bioluminescent animal. Below is a shot of Mosquito Bay’s tides at midnight.

An extract from the lovely post:

Any movement in the water sends a billow of bright blue-green light spinning and undulating in fractal beauty, like glowing green milk in coffee, until it eventually diffuses back into the dark stillness of the bay. Below you, bright blue tracer lines suddenly appear in the water as small fish dart through the blackness.

Bioluminescence is a from of natural light created by living organisms converting internal chemical energy into light. The light in Mosquito bay is created by a tiny organism called Dinoflagellate (specifically Pyrodimium bahamense). Mosquito bay contains an astonishing number, roughly 700,000 of these glowing fellas per single gallon of water. Although they are microscopic, the light they give off is a hundred times larger themselves, and in great numbers they light up like an underwater aurora borealis.

Man, this world is cool.