CANADA: Astonishing new types of glowing rainbow corals have been found in the red Sea.
Researchers say the previously unknown unique species glow remarkably.
They hope they could even lead to medical applications and new imaging tools.
The glowing corals display a surprising array of colours, scientists from the University of Southampton, UK, Tel Aviv University and the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences (IUI), Israel, together with an international team of researchers said.
The researchers, whose findings have been published online today in research journal PLOS ONE, hope that some of the coral pigments could be developed into new imaging tools for medical applications.
The team studied corals at depths of more than 50 metres and found that many of them glow brightly with fluorescent colours, ranging from green over yellow to red.
The encounter of such a rainbow of coral colours in deep waters was unexpected, since their shallow-water counterparts in the same reef contain only green fluorescent pigments.
Jörg Wiedenmann, Professor of Biological Oceanography and Head of the University of Southampton’s Coral Reef Laboratory, said : ‘These fluorescent pigments are proteins.
‘When they are illuminated with blue or ultraviolet light, they give back light of longer wavelengths, such as reds or greens.
