In the pitch darkness of the deep sea, a dark monster preys

Black the week was followed by a black Friday and an even blacker weekend. The November consumer celebration of discount products, known as “Black Friday”, has already stretched to a whole week.

But in the reputation of the sea, there is something even blacker than black. The deep blue lap gives birth to even darker silhouettes.

World the blackest fish were discovered five years ago. They are so black that they hardly reflect any light. You won’t find such a black color in the store, not even on the Black Friday makeup shelf.

Smithsonian Institution Marine Biologist Karen Osborn was suffering on the deck of the trawler when there was no way to get a decent picture of the fish that had been brought up from a kilometer deep. No, even though there was camera equipment representing the last cry. He researched the matter and wrote about it with his colleagues of the article Current Biology – science journal.

Melanin is a dark color pigment that gives color to human skin and hair. The color is packed in the skin in tiny grains, melanosomes. Some deep-sea fish have so many of these melanosomes and so densely that the surface of the fish absorbs all the light and does not reflect anything back. So the fish is completely black.

Or almost completely – the darkest fins absorb 99.5 percent of the light that hits them and reflect only 0.5 percent back. Therefore, even in the photos, the fish is a matte black waste, the details of which are barely visible on the surface.

Handsome in the picture of the thing Idiacanthus antrostomus named kitafish, biologist Osborn had to light it creatively with a flash in order to bring out the features of the fish. The pitch-black color gives the monster that preys in the depths a perfect protective color in the pitch darkness of the deep sea.

Deep even the fish of the sea have sex darker than a millionaire pig Jeffrey Epstein on the island.

Some crotchet fish, mentioned by Osborn, mate in such a way that the small male attaches to the larger female and merges into its side. The male dies and atrophies into a part of the female’s body, leaving only the gonads. From them, the female pumps sperm for herself as needed.

Maybe it’s a good thing that it’s hard to get photos of this act.