Move Over, Glowing Turtle—Meet the Glowing Eels
A small eel photographed by accident on a Caribbean coral reef is the first green fluorescent fish ever recorded, a new study says.
In the wake of a fluorescent sea turtle recently captured on video come two marine eels that glow neon green.
The first bright green fluorescent fish ever recorded in the wild, their discovery dates back to 2011, when a tiny eel photobombed David Gruber off Little Cayman Island in the Caribbean.
For Gruber, who was photographing biofluorescent corals at the time, the finger-length eel couldn’t have been more illuminating. (See "Rainbow of Fluorescent Corals Found—Why Do They Glow?")
“This big lightbulb went off in my head,” says Gruber, a National Geographic Explorer and marine biologist at City University of New York. “I hadn’t expected a fish to be glowing as brightly as the coral.”
That discovery sparked a new
