EXCLUSIVE: "Glowing" Sea Turtle Discovered
September 28, 2015 - While filming coral off the Solomon Islands,
David Gruber, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, encountered a "bright red-and-green spaceship." This underwater UFO turned out to be a hawksbill sea turtle, which is significant because it's the first time that
biofluorescence has ever been seen in reptiles
, according to Gruber. Gruber is now excited to learn more about this critically endangered species and how it is using biofluorescence.
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Exclusive Video: First 'Glowing' Sea Turtle Found"
Transcript
On-Camera: Cameraman:
“Wait…what did you find!”
On-Camera: DAVID GRUBER: “We found a biofluorescent turtle!”
Voice of DAVID GRUBER, MARINE BIOLOGIST and NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC EMERGING EXPLORER:
Scientist have only really tuned in to biolfluorescence in
the last ten years. And as soon as we
started tuning into it, we started to find it everywhere. First it was in
corals and jellyfish, then it was in fish. And there it was, this UFO!
On-Camera: MARKUS REYMANN, DIRECTOR, TBA21-ACADEMY: “This
turtle was just hanging out with us. It was so….It was in love with the
lights. It was just hanging out with us
and it was glowing neon yellow.” [LAUGHS]
On-Camera: DAVID GRUBER: “Yeah. It’s the first I’ve ever
seen of a biofluorescent turtle. Spectacular.”
Voice of DAVID GRUBER, MARINE BIOLOGIST and NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC EMERGING EXPLORER:
I was in the Solomon Islands on a TBA21-Academy expedition,
which is a new group that pairs up artists and scientists to do different
projects related to the marine environment.
I’m taking pictures of some corals that we already knew were
biofluorescent. And then in the middle—I guess maybe forty minutes into the
dive—out of the blue it almost looks like a bright red-and-green spaceship, you
know, came underneath my camera.
The only animal I know I really can tell you definitively
has two colors is corals. We’ve found lots of fluorescence in marine eels and
it’s all green fluorescence. And lots of fluorescence in gobis and that’s
mainly red fluorescence. So until we
actually get a hold of one of these turtles and really start to look at it
chemically, we wouldn’t know what it is.
On-Camera: DAVID GRUBER: “Beautiful stripes. Green across
the head, across the back. Um, just bumps into us. Basically I was just filming
coral and it came in front of my lens and it hung out with us for like…”
On-Camera: MARKUS REYMANN: “Three to five minutes. Something
like that.”
On-Camera: DAVID GRUBER: “And it went down deep.”
On-Camera: MARKUS REYMANN: “Super calm! I’ve never seen a
turtle that calm.”
On-Camera: DAVID GRUBER: “Yeah. I wanted to let him go after
little bit. I felt like he came and he divulged his secrets.”
Voice of DAVID GRUBER, MARINE BIOLOGIST and NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC EMERGING EXPLORER:
That was enough. That was enough to get this first little
bit of footage which really shows that turtle are biofluorescent. Now it opens
up all these new questions to us of what is it doing in these turtles.
We know that they have really good vision. They go under
these long and arduous migrations. But how are they using this. Are they using
this to find each other or are they using this to attract each other.
What’s even more sad as I think about this is that these
turtles have such a storied history and now they are critically endangered.
There’s some place where there just a few thousand breeding females remaining.
