Light 16: Bioluminescence

By Circe -

Welcome to the 2023 Advent Calendar, which this year is just a list of things that light up all pretty. Previous entries are here. If you enjoy this and want to encourage me to bang more things out on a keyboard, consider supporting my Patreon, or sending something off of my Christmas list. If you'd rather support my spoiled pets, their Ratmas list is here. If you want to spend money but not on me, you can direct your donations to Mainely Rat Rescue, who handles rescue and foster operations for rats, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, and other small mammals in the New England area, or the MSPCA, where my critters got their medical care before I found a good exotics vet, and where I picked up Koda and Yogi. 

Enjoy your trip through the cavalcade of things that go blinky-blink in the dark!

A rat with a glowing green aura.
Mwahahah, glowing rat! That took some Photoshop (well, GIMP). AI is not living up to the "I" part just yet -- I asked for a glowing rat, and it just sort of gave me a rat under a bright backlight? I'm like, no no, glowing from within. Literally, not like from emotional fulfillment (in rat terms, that would be "currently jamming a Froot Loop into his toofy little mouf"). Had to go in and do it, ineptly, myself. Bah, technology.

Bioluminescence is what you get when you cross a living creature with a glowstick. Glowsticks are chemiluminescent -- they glow because of a chemical reaction that emits energy in the form of light. Bioluminescence is that, only the chemicals are generated within the critter's body. The best known bioluminescent organisms on land are probably fireflies, but a lot more things glow underwater, including jellyfish, some corals, krill, shrimp, and the angler fish, an ugly mofo who uses a dangling antenna-lantern to lure other fishes into its mouth.

Most of these animals make use of an enzyme called luciferase to catalyze the reaction that results in light. (Lucifer gets a lot of bad press, but before he started asking awkward questions of the Almighty, he was known as the Angel of Light.) Some produce it in-house, others get it from their diet. Still others acquire the capacity for luciferin production via mad science! In the 2010s, researchers working on genetic manipulation realized that the gene for the green fluorescent protein that makes jellyfish glow is easy to stick to other, more important genes, and could be used as a marker for successful insertion. So obviously, they made a glow-in-the-dark kitten (who was also, incidentally, protected from FIV). The company that bred their own shiny Pokémon has sadly gone under, but the latest comment I could find on reddit suggests the cats produced were not only fine, but had been converted to pets, and some had had glow-in-the-dark kittens of their own.

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