Red Lights | thebereancall.org

TBC Staff

Deadly New Sea Creature Lures Fish with Red Lights

For fish, the red light district is deeper and more dangerous than anyone

imagined.

A newfound deep-sea relative of the jellyfish flashes glowing red lights on

twitching, stinging tentacles to lure fish to their deaths more than a mile

below the surface.

The discovery is odd, because scientists had figured deep-sea animals can't see red light, since they live where sunlight doesn't reach and therefore have no evolutionary reason to detect the color.

The transluscent, fragile creature is the first marine invertebrates ever

found that produce red light.

The discovery, detailed in the July 8 issue of the journal Science, was led

by Steven Haddock of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Haddock's team used a robotic submarine to retrieve three of the fragile

Erenna off the coast of California.

Two of the specimens had fish in them. But there aren't many fish at the

depths where these siphonophores live. Haddock and his colleagues speculate that the red light attracts rare fish and that perhaps the ability to see the light is more common in the deep sea than previously thought (Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience, July 2005).

[TBC: The amazing designs of the Creator continue to destroy preconceived ideas spawned by evolutionary theory.]