These ultra-black fish camouflage with the darkness of the deep sea
The ultra-black Pacific black dragon (Idiacanthus antrostomus), the second-blackest fish studied by the research team. (Karen Osborn, Smithsonian/)When we think of deep ocean creatures adapting to the dark, bioluminescent jellyfish or the glowy lures of an anglerfish come to mind. But other deep sea animals have adapted in the other direction, evolving skin that acts almost like a black hole, sucking in nearly all the light around it and reflecting very little, allowing the animals to blend in completely with the dark.In new research published in Current Biology on Thursday, scientists looked at 16 species of deep sea animals that can absorb more than 99.5 percent of visible light directed at them, making them some of the blackest known animals. They found that even though these 16 species were diverse, and some very distantly related, they all had dense pigmentation in their skin cells structured to both scatter and absorb...