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Sea Creatures with 'Invisibility Cloaks'


Claire.

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These Sea Creatures Have a Secret Superpower: Invisibility Cloaks

Being a snack-sized animal in the open ocean is tough. Some have it easier than others. Creatures on the bottom can blend in with stones and sand. Stands of kelp and coral provide hiding places in other ocean habitats. But in midwater, there is no place to hide. There, creatures can get eaten pretty quickly by something unless they can find a way to disappear. Laura Bagge, a graduate student at Duke University, thinks she knows how to make that happen—at least in a group of tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans called hyperiids.

Bagge, along with biologist Sönke Johnsen and Smithsonian zoologist Karen Osborn, recently published a paper in the journal Current Biology, describing how hyperiid amphipods use nanotechnology to cloak themselves with invisibility. The discovery was made by Bagge, the paper's lead author, who worked with Osborn at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. “She was interested in the transparency of these animals. Transparency has been looked at in other animals and they do it in known ways so far but nobody had looked at this in these guys."

Read more: Smithsonian

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