[HN Gopher] How ultra-black fish disappear in the deepest seas
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How ultra-black fish disappear in the deepest seas
Author : aaronharnly
Score : 66 points
Date : 2020-07-18 11:17 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| [deleted]
| DC-3 wrote:
| > "I'm always arguing with bird people on the internet," said
| Kory Evans, a fish biologist at Rice University who wasn't
| involved in the study. "I say, 'I bet these deep-sea fish are as
| dark as your birds of paradise.' And then boom, they checked, and
| that was exactly the case."
|
| I'm sick of reading internet arguments about polymorphism and
| browser monoculture and borrow checking and static linking.
| Someone please tell me where I can go on the internet to read
| biologists arguing about their favorite animals.
| nix23 wrote:
| Twitter ;)
| DanBC wrote:
| He's funny on Twitter.
|
| "Call me when a bird does this":
| https://twitter.com/Sternarchella/status/1220928865591271424...
|
| "Imagine dropping this hard. Birds could never."
| https://twitter.com/Sternarchella/status/1274179373235568641...
| krisoft wrote:
| How can you publish an article about ultra-black fish without
| putting a picture of a fish in some recognizable environment?
|
| Put it on a lab bench, next to a human hand and some printer
| paper. Or a banana. Anything the reader might recognize.
|
| "While some ultra-black fish might appear brownish, it's the
| product of camera overexposure and editing" Great. You know what
| does that mean? You need to find a better photo. That's what it
| means. What kind of lazy caption that is.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If there wasn't overexposure and editing, the fish would be
| just as black as the background, and you wouldn't be able to
| see them. Also, there may be none of those fish living in a
| more recognizable environment. A dead fish is too different
| from a living one, so it's not worth picturing them.
|
| Those photos are actually very good. They show in clear detail
| how those fish look like, including colors (not all entirely
| black). They are indeed missing a clear indication of their
| size (that could be artificial), but otherwise there isn't much
| to improve.
| krisoft wrote:
| "If there wasn't overexposure and editing, the fish would be
| just as black as the background, and you wouldn't be able to
| see them."
|
| Sure thing. In that environment that is true. I bet they
| didn't measure their reflectivity in the deep, but on a lab
| bench though.
|
| "A dead fish is too different from a living one, so it's not
| worth picturing them."
|
| Maybe so, except that's not true. Here is a picture of a
| common fangtooth: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a6/cd/3f/a6c
| d3f0a9cc47b9794fa... And here is an other one:
| https://insider.si.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/2011/09/fangtooth-...
|
| Any of these pictures would have been better to illustrate
| their colour.
| aliante wrote:
| Don't deep sea fish somewhat explode when raised?
| tejohnso wrote:
| Some relevant photos in this article linked from TFA.
| grawprog wrote:
| https://www.sciencealert.com/one-of-nature-s-blackest-colour...
|
| >Incidentally, this is what initially piqued Karen Osborn's
| interest. As a research zoologist at the Smithsonian's National
| Museum of Natural History, she grew frustrated trying to
| photograph a striking black fish that had been pulled from the
| deep sea. "It didn't matter how you set up the camera or
| lighting--they just sucked up all the light," says Osborn.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It is literally impossible for us with our human eyes to
| perceive these fish in anything like their natural environment.
|
| They aren't even black, to us. We evolved to see things in
| sunlight. These fish are black _at the wavelengths present in
| the deep_. That isn 't sunlight but luminescence. Shine
| sunlight on them and they could be any colour, something
| irrelevant for a fish that may well live without ever seeing
| sunlight. So we have a black fish illuminated by a light our
| eyes were not designed to see, in a place so dark we see can
| see nothing. Those aren't great preconditions for an accurate
| photoshoot.
| krisoft wrote:
| The article states: ""It's like looking at a black hole," Mr.
| Davis said."
|
| Presumably Mr. Davis is a human, and is describing the black
| hole-ness of these fish as he perceived them. In the
| sunlight. With his eyes. I would like a picture of that.
| Because seeing is believing.
|
| "They aren't even black, to us." You make this whole
| mythology up about how the fish are. I'm not sure why. Yes
| they are black. Anything with that reflectivity will be black
| to us. But we don't have to argue about that, we can just
| look at this picture of a Pacific Blackdragon:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwGT8egWEAAtdMf.jpg
| morsch wrote:
| Straight up nightmare fuel.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/Pd5vY
| A_No_Name_Mouse wrote:
| Title might be a bit misleading: they disappear against the black
| background, it's not that their numbers are diminishing.
| dang wrote:
| Yes. Our software decapitates some titles that have 'how' at
| the head. Usually they're less baity that way but occasionally
| a wrong meaning is created. We've re-howed this one.
| lioeters wrote:
| https://outline.com/zpTqCE
| aaronharnly wrote:
| These ultrablack fish are on par with the blackest artificial
| pigments:
|
| "A feat of engineering allowed humans to best them all with
| synthetic materials, some of which reflect only 0.045 percent of
| incoming light. ("Black" paper, on the other hand, returns a
| whopping 10 percent of the light it meets.)
|
| Now, it seems fish may come close to trouncing them all.
|
| One species profiled in the paper, a bioluminescent anglerfish in
| the genus Oneirodes, reflects as little as 0.044 to 0.051 percent
| of the deep-sea light it encounters. The other 99.95 percent, Mr.
| Davis and his colleagues found, gets lost in a labyrinth of
| light-swallowing pigments until it effectively disappears."
|
| The use of ultrablack combined with bioluminescence is especially
| interesting -- the fish puts a glowing lure to attract other
| fish, and has ultrablack skin to stay nearly invisible as the
| prey approaches.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| Fun pigment fact: everyone can use the "pinkest pink" except
| the inventor of the "blackest black"
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/vantablack-...
| labster wrote:
| He didn't invent it, he purchased an exclusive license to use
| Vantablack in art.
|
| Also, posting AMP links is treason, according to Friend
| Computer. Please report to the nearest suicide booth with
| clearance orange or lower for further processing. Using
| yellow suicide booths or higher will result in increased
| clone mortality.
| lioeters wrote:
| Original link: https://www.wired.com/story/vantablack-anish-
| kapoor-stuart-s...
| ghastmaster wrote:
| Vantablack absorbs up to 99.96% and the species of fish absorbs
| 99.95%. They must be talking about certain cells or pigments
| rather than the entire fish since they do not appear ultra-black
| in the images I see.
|
| Found in the paper:
|
| > We used a back-reflectance probe calibrated to a 2% diffuse
| reflectance standard to measure the reflectance at perpendicular
| incidence from the blackest undamaged patches of skin.
| dmix wrote:
| The sublinked NYTime article on ultra-black does a good job
| explaining both biological and manufactured blackest-of-blacks
| (with carbon nanotubes):
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/science/black-fashion-phy...
|
| Although predating the fish study.
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