Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, November 12, New Media Special Telegram US media said that the beak that can sense current, poisonous calcane bone spurs and breeding offspring through raw eggs, platypus can be described as one of the strangest mammals in the world. Now, the researchers have found that this "monster" has another surprising feature: its fur fluoresces under ultraviolet light.
According to the American Science News website reported on November 7, the platypus's thick, waterproof fur emits blue-green fluorescence after absorbing ultraviolet light, a phenomenon that mammalian Paula Speth Anish and colleagues stumbled upon.
After seeing a fluorescent flying squirrel in the wild, the researchers decided to study mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. After studying the flying squirrel furs preserved at the museum and finding that at least three types of flying squirrels could fluoresce, the team decided to study the fur of marsupial mammals again, because it was the only mammal that knew that fur could fluoresce. As it happens, the drawer of monoporans, an early branch of mammals that now only two remains, the platypus and the echidna, is just below the marsupial.
"I'm curious," said Anish of Ashland Northland College in Wisconsin, "so I pulled open the drawer of the single-perforate and shined the platypus fur with ultraviolet light." These furs have an incredible blue-green fluorescence. ”
To ensure that the fluorescence didn't appear because of the unusual fur preserved at the Field Museum of Natural History, the team studied platypus specimens at the Nebraska State University Museum in Lincoln, according to reports. Sure enough, it can also fluoresce. The researchers published the study on October 15.
Anish was confident that the fluorescence was not caused by human factors such as embalming, as there were several specimens of flying squirrels and echidna fur that did not fluoresce. Living creatures are likely to glow just like their fur, as is the case with all other mammals known to fluoresce.
The report pointed out that the purpose of the platypus to emit this blue-green fluorescence remains a mystery. Anish's intuition was that luminescence would keep platypuses that were essentially nocturnal travelers from being spotted by night predators who could see ultraviolet rays, because platypuses would absorb some of the ultraviolet rays, reducing the amount of reflection.