According to overseas media reports on July 18, a previous study released by scientists showed that at least 16 of the recently discovered deep-sea fish species belonged to the darkest creatures to date.
Alexander Davis, one of its authors, published the study in Current Biology, said the fish live in the sea 200 to 2,000 meters below the surface of the water, and the color is so dark that people can often only see their outlines.
Davis told ABC News: "They look like they're coming out of what you see. They will look a little different after leaving the water because they are shiny, but you can still see that they are surprisingly black and unbelievable. ”
He used the term "matte black" to describe them.
The ratio of the amount of light reflected on a species to incident light must be less than 0.5% to meet the criteria of "ultra-black".
The study found that a recently discovered fish of the genus Dreamhorn reflects between 0.044% and 0.051% of the amount of light reflected. This weak reflectiveness makes it even darker than the ultra-black butterfly, which reflects between 0.06% and 0.5% of the light, which is comparable to the black bird of paradise (the amount of light reflected is between 0.05% and 0.31%).
In contrast, the incident light reflected by the black paper is as high as 10%.
Davis said his colleagues Sonke Johnsen and Karen Osborn intended to photograph the particular fish, so they launched a search. However, they haven't been going very well because "they're so dark." ”
"We had to cast a lot of light to see the details, or we could only see one outline," he says. ”
They laid large nets 200 to 2,000 meters below the surface of the sea, then traveled through the water and caught the fish.
Then they began to study why the fish were so black.
Eventually, Davis said, they found out that this was because melanin plays a dual role in scattering and absorbing light, which is rare in ultra-black organisms.
Davis believes that the fish they found is only a small fraction of the ultra-black fish in the ocean.
"It's likely that there are more of these ultra-black deep-sea fish in the ocean, and it's almost impossible for us to catch every kind of ultra-blackfish," he said. ”
(Image source: abcnew Bing)