Glowing Snail Uses Light to Fight Off Foes: Big Pic
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Dec. 15, 2010 -- The ghostly glow projected by this animal may look like the spirit of a dead mollusk. In fact, the snail, Hinea brasiliana, produces light using a phenomenon known as bioluminescence.
What's more, the snail can use its luminescence to ward off predators, finds a study published in the online version of Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences).
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This species of "clusterwink snail" scatters light in all directions, rather focusing it into a single beam, according to scientists with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
From the predator's perspective, the light creates the illusion that the snail is bigger than it really is.
Dimitri Deheyn, who studied the snail along with co-author Nerida Wilson, believes these findings could be applied to the fields of optics or bioengineering research.
"Our next focus is to understand what makes the shell have this capacity and that could be important for building materials with better optical performance," Deheyn said in a press release.
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H. brasiliana is a native of Australia and is one of many different kinds of deep-sea bioluminescent creatures, in addition to squid, sharks and others.
Photo credit: Dimitri Deheyn/Scripps Institution of Oceanography
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