Photographer Shaun Jeffers traveled to the Waitomo area to capture its limestone caves, which are illuminated by glowworms. The alien-like critters emit a phosphorescent turquoise light.
They are the predatory maggots of a fungus gnat and the strands are made of a (in some species) poisonous mucus.
When moths, mosquitoes or other tiny insects enter the cave they will normally look for the sunlight or moonlight of the cave entrance to escape, but the collective glow of the maggots fools them into thinking they’re already outside. They’re basically imitating a sky together!
These guys are amazing to see in real life, it’s cold and damp but beautiful. Plus, who would have thought that warm orange juice would actually be good.
The question of how octopuses can match their surroundings while not being able to see colours is one hell of a puzzle. Christopher Stubbs may finally have found the answer: chromatic aberration.
Maybe octopuses do see colour – not from light hitting special retinal “photoreceptors” but thanks to chromatic aberration, where different colours of light focus at different distances behind a lens.
Eyes of cephalopods are quite unlike anything seen on land: U- and W-shaped pupils backed by a lens that moves back and forth, like a camera, rather than fattening or thinning like ours. But they also have only one photoreceptor, unlike our red, green and blue ones.
Stubbs idea is the following: by adjusting the focal point of their eyes, like a photographer adjusts a lens, cephalopods might be able to detect different wavelengths – or colours – of light. This is called chromatic aberration.
To test his idea, Stubbs created a computer model of how the animals’ eyes work and see if chromatic aberration was possible.
He found not only could a shifting lens do the trick, but the cephalopods’ quirky pupils only served to maximise the effect. As Stubbs says, these creatures might exploit a ubiquitous source of image degradation in animal eyes, turning a bug into a feature.
The unusual pupils of cephalopods (from the top, a cuttlefish, squid and octopus) allow light into the eye from many directions, which spreads out the colors and [certainly] allows the creatures to determine color, even though they are technically colorblind.
As the lens moved forwards and backwards, the different wavelengths focusing on the retina at different times built up a colour picture.
It is not a proof, but the idea is definitely worth investigating !
Brilliant and seemingly glowing, the bloodybelly comb jelly comes in different shades of red but always has a blood-red stomach. The sparkling display on the outside comes from light diffracting from tiny transparent, hair-like cilia. These beat continuously, propelling the jelly through the water. [X]
This hole in the ground is found along the Oregon coastline in Siuslaw National Forest. Best viewed from a distance, the process seen in this shot actually makes it quite hazardous. At low tide it shows up as nothing but a hole in the ground, but when the high tide is right or there are storms kicking waves in, the ocean can live up to the anger of its namesake.
