ILLUMINATE
Over the decades, scientists have traced the evolutionary roots of the living oceanic lights to primal seas hundreds of millions of years ago, long before the age of dinosaurs.
By contrast, terrestrial bioluminescence is relatively new. And the land creatures that light up, unlike their undersea kin, constitute a tiny minority. The ranks include not only fireflies but also some beetles, millipedes and earthworms.
The research institute — in Moss Landing, California, at the midpoint of the Monterey Bay shoreline — is a pioneer of deep ocean exploration. It was established in 1987 by David Packard, the billionaire co-founder of Hewlett-Packard and a creator of Silicon Valley.
Haddock is a world authority on bioluminescence who has published dozens of scientific papers on luminescent ocean life. A decade ago, he set up the Bioluminescence Web Page, which offers detailed information about deep-sea creatures, including dozens of dramatic images. It is required reading at some universities.
The 240 dives used to perform this survey were all research trips he had conducted personally since arriving in 1999 at the institute. Sailing out from Moss Landing, the cruises ranged up to 180 miles offshore and covered an area roughly the size of Ireland.
The sea floor off Monterey Bay, 60 miles south of San Francisco, drops off sharply, unlike the shallow continental shelves on most coasts. That makes it easy for research vessels to quickly reach and access deep environments.
For years, Haddock and his colleagues lowered robots on long tethers to explore the icy darkness. Sensitive cameras on the vehicles let the scientists conduct wide visual hunts. In all, the researchers made more than 350,000 sightings of deep-sea life.
Their finds included anglerfish, a famous example of bioluminescence. These skilled hunters lure prey by dangling lines tipped with glowing lures in front of large mouths full of daggerlike teeth.
A rare sighting was Vampyroteuthis infernalis — Latin for “vampire squid from hell.” The odd creature has blue eyes, a dark red body and cloaklike webbing over its arms. The tips glow.
Haddock and his colleagues have discovered that the squids also emit luminous blue particles that can form a glowing cloud around the animal, apparently to distract predators so the squid can vanish into darkness.
Many of the dives found swarms of gelatinous animals known as siphonophores. The otherworldly creatures have long bodies ringed by pulsing bells for propulsion, and up to thousands of elastic tentacles for catching and drawing in prey.
Most siphonophores light up brightly. Scientists judge their startling brilliance to be a way to scare off predators. Haddock and his colleagues uncovered another reason while studying a creature known as Erenna.
The ends of its tentacles turned out to bear twitching red lights, apparently for drawing prey into waiting stingers and its stomach. “It opened my eyes,” Haddock said.
On land, Martini took the lead in compiling the numbers, comparing the sea creatures seen during the dives with a list of animals known to be luminescent.
This comprehensive list was based on a review of previous scientific reports, as well as the firsthand observations that Haddock and other scientists have made over the years.
In the conclusion to their study, the scientists at the institute acknowledged that all their expeditions and efforts at summarization have produced no more than a rough estimate of the phenomenon’s true dimensions.