WIRED — You’ve never seen amphibians in this light before. Like, literally, this specific azure light. Today in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers for the first time show that amphibians glow if you throw blue light on them. The tiger salamander suddenly pops with brilliant green spots. Cranwell’s horned frog is striped in a nuclear glow. Even the marbled salamander’s tiny toe bones fluoresce brightly—oh, and as does its cloaca, perhaps as a kind of sexual display.
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So to get these images, the researchers flooded the amphibians with blue light and photographed them with a special filter that only allowed the fluorescent light from the animal to hit the camera.
They looked at 32 amphibian species, and managed to study 8 of the 10 families of salamanders. Every single one glows—some intensely, others less so. The tiger salamander in particular throws off gobs of green light. “When we imaged that species, it was really startling to both of us just how bright and brilliant the fluorescence was,” says St. Cloud State University herpetologist Jennifer Lamb, who published the paper with her colleague Matthew Davis, an ichthyologist. (A fish guy studying amphibians? Don’t worry—he studies biofluorescence under the deep blue sea, too.) “We also saw fluorescence in animals that otherwise under white light might kind of look like Plain Janes, that were maybe a duller brown or gray,” Lamb adds.
Read more: So, Amphibians Glow. Humans Just Couldn’t See it — Until Now
