How the hell did it take so long to discover this?
>What other secrets are they hiding?
>When last we checked on the platypus, it was confounding our expectations of mammals with its webbed feet, duck-like bill and laying of eggs. More than that, it was producing venom.
>Now it turns out that even its drab-seeming coat has been hiding a secret — when you turn on the blacklights, it starts to glow.
>As noted last month in the journal Mammalia, shining an ultraviolet light on a platypus makes the animal’s fur fluoresce with a greenish-blue tint. They’re one of the few mammals known to exhibit this trait. And we’re still in the dark about why they do it — if there is a reason at all.
>For most humans, ultraviolet light exists outside of the visible spectrum. But certain pigments can absorb it, drain off some of its energy, and re-emit what remains as a color that people can see. Many man-made things contain such pigments, including white T-shirts, Froot Loops and petroleum jelly.
>A lot of living things do, too. Scorpions, lichens and puffin beaks all pop under UV light. Blue light, which is a notch away from ultraviolet, makes the undersea world look like an indoor mini golf course, and causes dozens of types of amphibians to glow green.
>Mammals, though, seem to have generally gotten the short end of this paintbrush: So far, not many have been found to have coats or skin that fluoresce. But there are exceptions, all among nocturnal creatures. In the 1980s, for example, a few researchers uncovered a rainbow of opossums.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/science/platypus-glow-ultraviolet.html
>What other secrets are they hiding?
>When last we checked on the platypus, it was confounding our expectations of mammals with its webbed feet, duck-like bill and laying of eggs. More than that, it was producing venom.
>Now it turns out that even its drab-seeming coat has been hiding a secret — when you turn on the blacklights, it starts to glow.
>As noted last month in the journal Mammalia, shining an ultraviolet light on a platypus makes the animal’s fur fluoresce with a greenish-blue tint. They’re one of the few mammals known to exhibit this trait. And we’re still in the dark about why they do it — if there is a reason at all.
>For most humans, ultraviolet light exists outside of the visible spectrum. But certain pigments can absorb it, drain off some of its energy, and re-emit what remains as a color that people can see. Many man-made things contain such pigments, including white T-shirts, Froot Loops and petroleum jelly.
>A lot of living things do, too. Scorpions, lichens and puffin beaks all pop under UV light. Blue light, which is a notch away from ultraviolet, makes the undersea world look like an indoor mini golf course, and causes dozens of types of amphibians to glow green.
>Mammals, though, seem to have generally gotten the short end of this paintbrush: So far, not many have been found to have coats or skin that fluoresce. But there are exceptions, all among nocturnal creatures. In the 1980s, for example, a few researchers uncovered a rainbow of opossums.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/science/platypus-glow-ultraviolet.html
