Biofluorescent Night Dive - Sunset Reef, East end of Grand Cayman

Night dives are cool, but add a black light filter to your monster HID light, and you get to see a hidden world WITHIN a hidden world.

There are proteins in the bodies of many species of coral, jellyfish, anemones, certain kinds of fish, and even nudibranchs (that eat anemones to pass their GFP into themselves) that fluoresce under UV light. Most of the time it is Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), but sometimes you see red and orange fluorescence, and if your lucky, you'll see a coral displaying both green and orange (some brain coral and soft corals will do this).

The fluorescence shows up much brighter in actual viewing than the video can record due to the cameras auto-equalizing of light levels, so the actual scuba diver sees an unreal light show. Some corals fluoresce so bright that it literally looks like neon is inside, as the electrically charged photons of invisible UV light come back to your eye as energized visible light.

My light is a 24 watt HID that outputs a whopping 1750 lumens which is almost 40 times brighter than a large Mag Light, and some of that light is UV light. It even cures my UV glue in seconds in my shop (I'm a polymer scientist in UV resins). So I bought a dichroic "Wood's Glass" filter from Roscoe (through a theater lighting supplier) and fabricated a snap-fit ring to fit my light, and you see the results above.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• biofluorescence
• biofluorescent
• fluorescent
• night dive
• scuba
• coral
• anemone
• underwater
• diving

[beastinn999991111]

is that a lettuce coral?