Curious Expeditions is a wild site full of the interesting and well worth the death of your productivity. Their team travels the world looking for the "wondrous, the macabre, and the obscure." The entry on Living Lights is phenomenal. A bit late for Earth Day but hey, you don’t need a day to revel in the glory of the planet.
The post is a great catalog of various living organisms and their illuminating character, like the bioluminescent plankton of Mosquito Bay in Puerto Rico. (It was these types of plankton that featured in the the movie Nim’s Island.) Or the firefly squid from Japan.
We’re approaching firefly season here in the east. Around me, the firefly cycle has been particularly abundant these last few years. Something I did not know up until a couple of seasons ago was that in a given area of blinking woods, there could be dozens of different species of firefly at work, all with their own pattern of blinks.
Bioluminescence has got to be one of the coolest things in the natural world. Whether it’s plankton, fireflies, or mollusks, the effect is just stunning and can amaze geekkids of any age. There are few other things here on Earth that give the impression of life on an alien planet. My favorite though has got to be the glowing mushrooms from Brazil.
I often think that by the time the geeklings are older, tattoos and piercings will be passé. Bioluminescence shops, the next big body adornment thing!
