Mystery of Transparent Fish Solved: Why Do They Shine Colorful?

You must have seen the transparent fish, which is one of the extraordinary natural beauties we come across on social media many times. scientific name ‘Kryptopterus vitreolus’ The most striking feature of these enormous creatures, which are living creatures, is that they are transparent.

In fact, due to the fact that they are transparent, they sometimes cause discoloration. they can even reflect rainbow colors. Of course, people don’t think, these creatures are transparent, okay.

So how can these fish shine like a rainbow?

Qibin Zhao, a physicist at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, was also curious about this question and began to research this creature. ghost catfish, allows 90% of the light to pass directly through your body. It also has no scales and its skin is about 20 micrometers thin.

But that doesn’t explain why the fish reflect the colors of the rainbow. To explain this situation, researchers by separating the skin from the back and abdominal muscles They cut the fish into pieces.

The researchers shined a white laser on the skin of the fish, and this beam passed directly through the skin. However, the same was not the case for the muscles. Something inside them causes light waves to fluctuate in a way known as diffraction and it had a rainbow effect.

Each muscle is made up of elastic units called sarcomeres. Using electron scanning microscopy and optical microscopes, the researchers found that these fibrous units behaving like diffraction gratings and discovered that it split the light beam into a rainbow as it passed through the structure.

The directions of the fish as they move create varying angles at which light hits the muscles and causes the colors broken by the muscles to appear like rainbows.

The researchers point out that other fish have the same muscle type, but because their skin is not transparent, the shine cannot be seen from the outside. Which, as researchers have already explained, are these creatures. they are not completely transparent.

According to the team’s estimation, the reason why this fish of the Kryptopterus vitreolus species glows in color is because distract the hunters and a trait evolved for survival. Another possibility is that the fish use it as a communication system. Because these fish are very social species that live in communes.