Puffin Beaks Glow in Surprising Discovery

As soon as Jamie Dunning flipped on the black light in his lab,
the Atlantic
puffin^[1]‘s beak lit up like a
neon Christmas tree.

The University of Nottingham Ph.D. student^[2] was studying the dead
animal as part of his work on bird genetics when he remembered
something a colleague had told him: Crested auklet^[3] feathers glow when
viewed under a UV light.

Since puffins are closely related to auklets, Dunning’s
curiosity was piqued—and sure enough, his specimen’s beak glowed
orange.

Biofluorescent animals reflect the blue light hitting a surface
and re-emit it as a different color—the most common being green,
red, or orange. That’s different from bioluminescence^[4], in which animals either
produce their own light through a series of chemical reactions, or
host other organisms that give off light.

The puffin is the latest addition to more than 180 known
species—many of them sharks, corals, and other marine animals—that
emit a luminous glow.

The fact that so many marine animals biofluoresce “tells us
organisms are using light in ways we don’t even see,” John
Sparks^[5], curator of fishes at
the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, said in a
previous interview.

Dunning immediately set about writing up his discovery for
publication, and his paper landed on the desk of Tony
Diamond^[6], an ornithologist at the
University of New Brunswick in Canada.

Diamond had observed this phenomenon in puffins decades before,
but hadn’t thought to write it up. So he asked Dunning if he could
add his older data to the new findings; the combined results from
two decreased puffins (one from the UK and one from Canada) are
under review at a scientific journal and have yet to be formally
published.

The team now wants to determine whether the phenomenon occurs in
living puffins. However, they can’t just put random live puffins
under a UV light, because it might damage their eyes.

So Dunning called up experts at Goldsmiths, University of London
to request an object that would protect the birds’ eyes.

“I couldn’t believe I was ringing them up to ask for puffin
sunglasses,” Dunning quips.

The Goldsmiths team is now hard at work to design and produce a
set of flexible yellow glasses for Dunning to take into the field
this summer. Until then, it’s unknown why the birds’ beaks glow
orange.

In such a dim environment, animals rely on other ways of
generating light to communicate with each other.

“It’s a hidden world that we’re just now beginning to tune
into,” David Gruber^[7], a marine molecular
biologist at City University of New York and National
Geographic explorer^[8], said in an earlier
interview.

His research group has begun using a hyperspectral camera to try
and capture the underwater world through the eyes of its
inhabitants.

“We miss things that are happening in the worlds of other
animals if we just use our mammalian eyes,” Gruber says.

Jane J. Lee contributed reporting.