A team of researchers has discovered a rare ketvin shark, which is the largest luminous deep-water marine creature, with a length of 1.8 meters, at a depth of 800 meters east of New Zealand.
“This type of shark uses two or three hormones to stimulate or slow the emission of light, and this glowing process is slow and takes time,” says Jerome Malefit, a biologist at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. Extinguishes itself quickly,” according to the newspaper “The Guardian”.
After discovering the luminous sharks, Malefit carefully moved one of them to a dark room, and in this darkness he could see a live shark glowing blue and green.
Sharks have small cup-shaped structures spread across their skin, and in the center of each cup there are light-emitting cells and a lens that directs the light out.
The small sizes of ketvin sharks illuminate their backbones to warn strangers to stay away from them, as well as some male sharks illuminate their genitals during the mating period. While many of these fish also have stomachs that can light up so that their light mixes with the blue light from the surface in order to be hidden from other animals. As for the large sizes of this type of sharks, their stomachs light up to reveal the sea floor, so that they can clearly see their prey.
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The luminous ketvin sharks still hold mysterious secrets regarding how they produce light in the first place, especially since many luminous marine creatures contain symbiotic bacteria in their bodies that help illuminate them, but none of them have been found in the luminous ketvin sharks.
Some other luminous organisms produce chemicals that carry out reactions that produce light, but they have not been shown to be present in ketvin sharks either, which makes it a mystery to scientists.