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This story was originally appeared Atlas Obscura and Climate Table collaboration.
As he was hiking through the rainforest of Peru, from the jungle location closest to the eight-hour boat, biologist Aaron Pomerantz saw what appeared to be small invisible vortices crossing the route. “I was on the net trying to catch things,” he says, “and these changed direction and disappeared.”
It was his first encounter with light-winged butterflies, insects that live in the forests of Central and South America and have significant resources for camouflage: spectacular or “glassy” wings that make it particularly hard to spot in a dense transverse area.
“It’s like the power of invisibility,” says Pomerantz, the author of a recent study Journal of Experimental Biology examines how southern lights develop. “If you can wear an invisibility cloak, it’s much harder for predators to find you. There are many transparent species in ocean environments, but much less on land. And that really comes in: ‘What does it take to be transparent on earth?’ “
Examining the wings of the species Greta car, also known as the glass butterfly, at various stages of puppet development, Pomerantz and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and Caltech found some of the factors. There are changes in the shape and density of microscopic scales, which usually produce colorful patterns of a butterfly. A layer of small wax columns functions as an extra cover against the roof.
It seems like a special adaptation, it’s not. “It’s evolved several times,” Pomerantz says. There are several types of butterflies and moths with glass wings, he noted. They represent only a small part of the order Lepidoptera, make up most of the rare cases of such transparency on the ground. Glass frogs, which have different levels of skin permeability, are another example.
The ocean, on the other hand, is home to spectacular species such as jellyfish and sponges, crustaceans, cephalopods and even fish. In the summer of 2021, two strange sightings of the glass octopus were made during an expedition aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute research vessel. Falkor, To the watery depths of the remote Phoenix Islands in the Pacific Ocean. It is achieved by being invisible, much easier in the ocean than on land, in part because of the visual and physical properties of water.
“You might think of it as having a piece of glass in the water,” says marine biologist Laura Bagge. “This environment is much more shapeless than on land, and you don’t have to deal with gravity. So most of these animals are watery and floating things without the backbones or dense structures needed to survive on land.”
Imagine that classic Jaws the scene — from the shark’s point of view — against the light of the silhouette of a swimmer descending from above. Where the sun shines, underwater predators can easily see the opaque shapes, so being transparent helps you slip. It remains more useful in the ocean, even in the aphotic zone — at a depth where little or no sunlight enters — as many bioluminescent animals emit their light, Bagge says.
A senior biologist at Torch Technologies in Florida, Bagge was fascinated by animal transparency in his dissertation at Duke University during his research trip. He put his hand into a bowl of sea creatures and pulled out a mysterious specimen. “It was tough, like a lobster, but the animal was completely light,” he says. It was a shrimp-shaped crustacean, Cystisoma, which can be as large as a human hand. “They’re very fresh because they have a hard outer shell and they’re full of muscle. How do you make that clear?”
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