Latest news with #bioluminescence
BBC News
3 days ago
- Science
- BBC News
Volunteers sought to help survey glow worms in Cumbria
Volunteers are being sought to help survey for glow worms at a country estate. They will spend 10 weeks looking for the insects, which are beetles that use bioluminescence to attract mates, across the Lowther Estate near Penrith, Cumbria. The volunteers will be trained by experts from Manchester Museum to try and find glow worms, which are believed to be declining in insects are "voracious" predators of snail and slug populations, Lowther Conservation ecologist Elizabeth Ogilvie said. "[They help] maintain balance in our landscapes," she said. "They also contribute to soil health by cycling nutrients back into the ecosystem."Ms Ogilvie said their glowing signals which are vital for mating are often drowned out by artificial lights and their numbers appear to be declining across the country. The survey, which will be conducted in the evenings, will help scientists determine whether glow worms are present on the estate, assistant curator from Manchester Museum, part of The University of Manchester, Bethany Dean may provide an opportunity for long term monitoring on the site, she Ogilvie said no experience was necessary to volunteer – simply an "eagerness to help on summer evenings". Follow BBC Cumbria on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.
The Sun
15-05-2025
- Health
- The Sun
Humans 'emit mysterious light that disappears when we die' – as scientists say we really do ‘glow' with health
HUMANS do actually glow with health, according to scientists, as a new study suggests our bodies emit an extremely faint light that goes out when we die. It's not just humans either - but seemingly all life. 3 3 A new experiment on mice and plants, from the University of Calgary and the National Research Council of Canada, found that both lifeforms exhibit physical evidence of an eerie 'biophoton'. Biophotons, or ultra-weak photons, are tiny particles of light emitted by living organisms. But this light - which is so faint it cannot be seen by the naked eye - is extinguished under extreme stress or death, University of Calgary physicist Vahid Salari and his team have claimed. Researchers found they could capture the biophotons emitting from mouse cells before and after death in the visible band of light. There was a significant difference in the numbers of these photons in the period before and after the mice were euthanised. The study was also carried out on thale cress and dwarf umbrella tree leaves, to reveal similar results. Stressing the plants by crushing them showed strong evidence that reactive oxygen species could in fact be behind the soft glow. "Our results show that the injury parts in all leaves were significantly brighter than the uninjured parts of the leaves during all 16 hours of imaging," the researchers wrote in their report. A separate 2009 study also suggested that humans are bioluminescent. 'The human body literally glimmers,' study authors wrote at the time. 'The intensity of the light emitted by the body is 1000 times lower than the sensitivity of our naked eyes.' Salari and his team believe that being able to monitor this healthy glow could eventually provide medical specialists with a powerful, non-invasive research or diagnostics tool. It could offer a new way to remotely monitor the stress of individual tissues in whole human or animal patients. Alternatively, it could even work among crops or bacterial samples. 3
BBC News
11-05-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Scars from the world's first deep sea mining test 50 years on
Half a century after the world's first deep sea mining tests picked nodules from the seafloor off the US east coast, the damage has barely begun to heal. Plunging to the ocean's abyss on the Blake Plateau, a deep-sea mountain range off the coast of North Carolina, is an otherworldly experience. It's like no other ocean bed that microbiologist Samantha Joye has ever visited. In her deep-sea submersible called Alvin – a three-person vessel made of titanium thick enough to withstand pressure in the ocean's depths, with two robotic arms reaching outside for sample collection – it takes more than an hour to descend to about 2,000m (6,600ft) below the water's surface. On the way down, the water is on fire with bioluminescence and abounds with wildlife. There are huge fish, small fish and jellyfish. Shrimp, sea slugs, octopuses and hundreds of squid bump into the submarine, seeming to be curious about its free fall into their home. "I have worked all over the place, and my mind was blown on the Blake Plateau. I mean, it's just spectacularly diverse," says Joye, recalling her last trip to the plateau in August 2018. At touchdown, the silty floor is covered in worms, sponges, stars and mussels the size of an adult human's forearm, says Joye, gesturing to her own limb to show me. Among the abundance of life, though, a section of the Blake Plateau is barren with the scars from the world's first deep-sea mining pilot test carried out in 1970. That experiment 50 years ago was just a proof-of-concept, but full-scale commercial deep-sea mining is on many of today's national to-do lists. In April 2025, Trump signed an executive order to fast-track deep-sea mining. The traces of those first rudimentary tests on the Blake Plateau are still visible today, half a century on, and scientists think they're just a small example of the effects deep-sea mining could have on the ocean ecosystem if it were to be conducted at scale. The world's first deep-sea mining test was conducted by US company Deepsea Ventures in July 1970. A vacuum-cleaner-like machine bulldozed through the abyss and sucked up 60,000 baseball-sized lumps off the bottom of the ocean. The nodules – filled with manganese, nickel and cobalt that accumulate a few millimetres per million years – were hoped to become a resource for the nation's industrial endeavours. There remains high interest in them today, as they're replete with minerals for making batteries for electric cars and smartphones, as well as medical and military technology. Deepsea Ventures' project fell through, and no more deep-sea mining was done off the US East Coast. But a remote-controlled robot sent to that segment of the Blake Plateau during a 2022 scientific expedition found the company's footprints. Scientists snapped pictures of defined dredge lines in the mud for more than 43km (27 miles). The lines dug into the abyss like train tracks, as if somebody had raked through it just recently, and the damage was "widespread and definable", according to reports. Where the tracks are, there is nothing: no nodules and no biodiversity. No curious squid. Nothing like the kaleidoscope of beauty Joye encountered in 2018, just around the corner. While no data is available on what that part of the Blake Plateau looked like before the deep-sea mining experiments in the 1970s, the contrast between the desolate scraped mud tracks and the rest of the Blake Plateau is stark. (You can see these tracks in the image at the top of this article.) The site is a proxy for what might happen elsewhere, says Joye. Before and after data from a mining simulation in an analogous area in the Pacific Ocean, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, south-east of Hawaii and poised to be a deep-sea mining hotspot, suggests these ecosystems take hundreds of years to bounce back. Segments there that had been test-ploughed through in 1989 had much lower diversity of large animals, especially filter feeders, and still had up to just half of their microbial communities after 26 years. "And if you were thinking about something that was going to recover pretty quickly, it would be microbes, right?" says Joye. "And that was essentially a controlled experiment supposed to do minimal damage." Research from March 2025 confirmed the findings, noting that despite some recent recolonisation of the area, the impacts likely last for decades. The Metals Company and Impossible Metals, two players currently active in the field, say their machines are now much more sophisticated, sustainable and less invasive than those from the pilot test half a decade ago. Impossible Metals, for instance, aims to pick up nodules one by one, "delicately", their reports say, without raking the seabed. Impossible Metals has already placed a request for a lease for exploration and mining off the coast of American Samoa. "All mining has impacts. We have invented new technology to minimise the impacts," says Impossible Metals chief executive Oliver Gunasekara. He notes mining today is carried out in some of the world's most biodiverse areas, like the Indonesian rainforest, which is mined for nickel. As part of any mining permit approval, an environmental impact assessment would be performed to understand the impacts and "make sure they are acceptable", says Gunasekara. Yet, researchers already think there are dozens of possible effects on the seabed. And precisely forecasting the impacts of deep-sea mining is difficult because so little is known about these sprawling underwater ecosystems – with more than 70% of the world's waters still unmapped, says Christopher Robbins, associate director of Ocean Conservancy. In 2023, researchers suggested that about 90% of species in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, are new to science: they found more than 5,000 deep-sea creatures they'd never seen before. In 2024, scientists discovered the world's largest deep-sea coral reef on the Blake Plateau: more than 83,000 individual coral mound peaks spanning 500km (310 miles) in length and 100km in width (60 miles), all the way from the coast of South Carolina to the tip of Florida. The researchers from the US' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) who discovered the coral reefs told the BBC they were not available to discuss the work at this time. Since more than 20 different pharmaceuticals have been developed thanks to organisms discovered in the deep sea, many undiscovered concoctions could be lost to deep-sea mining before even being discovered. Plus, the abyssal plain is not the only ecosystem at risk, says Robbins. The mining machines trawling through the ocean bed release waves of sediment from the ground, and discharge mining wastewater from the vessels on the surface, cycling abyssal debris in plumes that can travel large distances into the water column. Research shows the plumes could mess with the lifestyle, reproduction and feeding of organisms living in these areas. Studies suggest they can stress out jellyfish's mucus production and make it hard for organisms to communicate via bioluminescence, or clog fish's airways and end up in their diet. It's unclear what impact this will have on the ocean's ability to capture carbon, Robbins says. Species living in the dark zone above the abyss but below the surface are responsible for drawing down upwards of six gigatons of carbon, which is about 14% of the carbon that humans emit into the atmosphere each year, says Robbins. (The vacuuming vehicles could also be releasing more than 172 tonnes of carbon directly from the seabed every year for every square kilometre mined, according to Planet Tracker.) Aside from the wildlife impact, deep-sea mining in US waters can have some substantial impacts on the fishing industry, according to Robbins's recent report on potential conflicts in both oceans. "There are just too many unanswered questions that require us to take a step back to allow the fishing industry, frankly, to be better informed about the trade-offs," says Robbins. Off the US West Coast, another study from 2023 suggested that the migration routes of bigeye, skipjack and yellowfin tuna could overlap with potential sediment plumes if commercial mining were to be unrolled. Other research has suggested that small developing countries catch as much as 10% of their tuna from areas likely affected by deep-sea mining. More like this:• Colossal squid: The eerie ambassador from the abyss• Saving the world's most expensive fish• Tracking turtles during the 'lost years' The Blake Plateau, still scarred from the 1970 mining experiment, is likely not a target for deep sea mining yet, says Gorka Sancho, a fish ecology expert at College of Charleston, who penned a petition letter to President Joe Biden in 2024 calling for robust long-term protections of the Blake Plateau. "But everything can change on a dime these days," says Sancho. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, on the other hand, is where miners have set their targets. Studies suggest this area alone contains more nickel, cobalt and manganese than all of the deposits on land. In April 2025 Trump signed an executive order to fast-track deep-sea mining called Unleashing America's Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources. Some days later, the government received a request for license to explore and to mine from the Canadian firm The Metals Company, including areas outside the US's jurisdiction. If the US granted such a permit, this could be in conflict with the international framework governing international waters and the seabed, known as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), according to the ISA's secretary-general Leticia Reis de Carvalho. (It's worth noting, however, that the US has never ratified Unclos.) The BBC contacted The Metals Company for comment but received no response by the time of publication. Trump's order commits Noaa to expedite mining permits. Robbins comments that the executive order is at odds with Noaa's mission. The BBC contacted Noaa for comment but received no response by the time of publication. At a congressional hearing about the new legislation, MIT mechanical engineering professor Thomas Peacock stated that some of the impacts of nodule mining "may not be as speculated". His work in 2022, carried out in part on behalf of The Metals Company, showed that only 2-8% of the murky plumes reach 2m (6.5ft) above the seabed and do not settle for hours, but that is just a few milligrams of sediment per litre and "roughly the equivalent of a grain of sand in a fishbowl". Still, Peacock suggested we need further advances in sensor technologies and computational modelling to craft reliable predictions of the impacts of commercial-scale ocean floor exploitation. He also suggested that large off-limit areas will have to be instituted to protect wildlife. Many nations around the world have called for a moratorium on seabed mining until the risks are fully assessed, the science is clear, and the regulation is in place. More than 900 scientists and policy experts have also signed a letter asking for a delay in commercial activity. In the meantime, the scars from the US's first foray into deep-sea mining testing are still there on the ocean floor, half a century on. They remain still in time, etched into the abyss, at the bottom of a world swirling with life. "I see this place as a national treasure. What makes this place so special?" says Joye, reminiscing on her last dive down at the Blake Plateau. "That mystery is something that we need to solve, so that we can serve as stewards of these habitats." -- For essential climate news and hopeful developments to your inbox, sign up to the Future Earth newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
BBC News
09-05-2025
- Science
- BBC News
From sea sparkles to fireflies: Chasing Australia's 'big four'
In Australia's Illawarra region, a ghostbusting-style night tour reveals ghost fungi, sea sparkles and tiny creatures lighting up the dark. On a slate-black night, I stare at a horizon freckled with stars. Only this isn't the sky, illuminated by hundreds of constellations; it's the muddy bank of a river, charged by a colony of glow worms. "This is my TV," says David Finlay. "It's magical, like something out of Avatar." By day, Finlay works as a transport manager, but by night, he scours Australia's bushland and beaches chasing living light. "If you're tucked up at home, you miss these things. Everybody cocoons themselves at night, whereas I think, what fun can I have?" he says. Bioluminescent creatures lurk in many corners of the world, but Australia's Illawarra region on New South Wales' south coast is a magnet for glowing phenomena. With low light pollution, ample rainfall and high humidity, it's an ideal microclimate for these creatures to thrive and trap prey. Many are clustered along the Illawarra Escarpment, a sweep of sandstone cliffs, fringed with forests that roll into the Pacific Ocean. "Our escarpment habitat is special. It's a well-preserved subtropical rainforest environment, which helps protect fragile bioluminescent life forms," says Finlay. From his home in Kiama, Finlay can spot the "big four" within an hour's drive. There's sea sparkle, plankton that paints the ocean an electric blue; ghost fungi, mushrooms that radiate an eerie green; and glow worms and fireflies, which pierce the night-sky like tiny lanterns. These natural phenomena are notoriously unpredictable and fickle to find, dictated by seasons, weather and light patterns. They are also extremely fragile, as mounting evidence shows bioluminescent creatures are waning with climate-change and human disturbance. But for a growing number of glow seekers, who, like Finlay, visit with care, the challenge is part of the adventure. When I meet Finlay at a clearing near Cascade Falls in Macquarie Pass National Park, it's only an hour past sunset, yet we're cloaked in darkness. It's Friday night, and while most people are under artificial lights, toasting to the end of the week, we're here to find natural shimmers in the night. We trek through a path that cuts through the towering eucalypt trees, our head torches glowing red to cause minimal disturbance to wildlife. The full Moon pilots from above and the flow of the river whooshes us forward, guiding our footsteps towards the waterfall. "If something flies straight past your face, it's probably just a micro bat," warns Finlay. "They're very gentle, they're just looking for insects to eat." Cascade Falls has an ideal microclimate for glow worms and fireflies, he explains. Glow worms aren't worms – in Australia and New Zealand, they are the larvae of fungus gnat. Elsewhere in the world, the glow often comes from beetles. They hide in wet, dark places, such as dank caves, abandoned tunnels or thick rainforest. Glow worms are endemic to Australia and New Zealand, and while many travellers visit iconic spots like Tamborine Mountain in Queensland, there are lesser-known colonies that can be discovered if you know where to look. As my eyes adjust, I begin to notice more – the gnarled roots of a tree and a feathery mushroom cap. Finlay's vision is far better trained; he can easily spot silver spiders eyes blinking at us like cat's eyes on a motorway. He sweeps a UV torch across the floor, illuminating the undergrowth. A caterpillar glows fluorescent white, some lichen neon green, a leaf an aggressive shade of electric blue. "Ah, that's just possum wee," he clarifies. Finlay runs ad hoc glow tours (when available, he posts them on his Facebook page) in the Illawarra, showing locals and visitors the spectacle that most of us overlook at night. Last year, a few hundred places on his guided walks sold in a flash – as 25,000 people vied to secure a spot. "For a lot of people, it's like finding gold, and nobody will tell you where they find the gold," says Finlay. But it's a delicate balance between educating visitors and conserving these habitats. "This national park is already impacted by people. I don't tell people about the really natural spots, as too many people would destroy those environments," he says. More like this:• The Indian Ocean's laid-back 'paradise on Earth'• India's mysterious glowing forests• How a fictitious 'sea' became a top Maldivian tourist attraction Both fireflies and glow worms are incredibly sensitive, susceptible to habitat destruction from people, urbanisation and bush fires. The "Black Summer" bushfires of 2019-20 wiped out a "horrific" number of bioluminescent creatures, he says, with colonies impacted in national parks across Australia. "I give people a list of dos and don'ts when they're out in the environment, and I tell them to teach other people this," says Finlay. A golden rule, like almost everything in the natural world, is to look but not touch. "So much as holding a glow worm in the palm of your hand will kill them," says Finlay. Bright flashing lights or even breathing too close can trigger them to shut down and disrupt their feeding patterns. We keep our voices low and hushed, and we tread carefully, making sure to move through the bush slowly. For safety, Finlay suggests bringing a friend on a night adventure. He beams a laser pointer through the sky, tracing the kite-like constellation of the Southern Cross, in case I ever get lost and need to navigate my way south. We scramble down the embankment towards the mouth of the waterfall, following the tiny orbs of light. Tucked in the overhang of the river are dozens of glow worms, like a fairy grotto or twinkling Christmas light display. Up close, tendrils of silky web drip down, hanging like strings of pearls. "Glow worms hide from sunlight, they'll crawl into nooks and crannies during the day, and when they come out at night, they have to rebuild their webs," says Finlay. Despite their beauty, these webs are death traps – snaring insects that are lured by glow-worm light. Under the lens of the camera, the riverbank looks even more spectacular, with crystal droplets clustered around an iridescent light. It's clear why Bioluminescence Australia – a Facebook group with more than 64,000 members – has become so popular. The page was created to share photos of bioluminescent phytoplankton blooms, but it's also a message board for tracking down glowing phenomena. Glow hunters follow a rough calendar – glow worms can generally be found year-round, whereas fireflies glimmer for a short window in Australia's late spring/summer (November to February). Elusive ghost mushrooms tend to fruit in autumn (March to May) when the temperature cools. One of the most sought-after experiences is paddling through bioluminescence, or bio. "Everybody wants to see it, and one of the reasons is that it's so Instagrammable. You can swish your feet through it and make sparkles," says Finlay. One of the best spots to see a "blue tide" in Australia is in Jervis Bay, further along the NSW south coast, or around Hobart in Tasmania. Christine Dean Smith is a member of the group who has photographed sea sparkles for more than a decade. "I hunt for bio because I have skin cancer and I'm banned from daylight," she says. "Being a photographer, you tend to adjust yourself to finding nighttime nature to capture instead and then I show it to my followers." When we've spotted enough nature glowing, we retreat back through the bush to the clearing. Something flashes in my vision under Finlay's fluorescent torch – vivid, electric even; everything I've been told to keep my eyes peeled for. Maybe, I'm getting the hang of hunting for sparkles in the dark. "Nope, just more possum wee," Finlay says. -- For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
