Diving For Science 2005 Proceedings Of The American

Diving For Science 2005 Proceedings Of The American Academy Of Underwater Sciences
Figure 1. White-light (left) and fluorescence photographs of two corals (above, Roatan, Honduras) and a
bristleworm (below, Bonaire).
History
The first printed record we have found of fluorescence of a marine organism dates to 1927. A
Mr. C. E. S. Phillips (Phillips, 1927) was walking along the shore in Torbay, England, and
noticed that the anemones in a tidepool seemed to be an especially bright green. He collected
several specimens and used a light with a Wood's glass filter (a filter that absorbs visible
light and transmits only ultraviolet) to confirm that it fluoresced under ultraviolet light.
Phillips suggested that marine biologists add such a light to their repertoire of research
equipment, but nothing came of his suggestion.
In the 1930's and '40's Siro Kawaguti, a Japanese marine biologist working at the Palao
Tropical Biological Station, studied the pigments of corals. He noted that the most common
pigment was a fluorescent green. Kawaguti carried out a number of manipulative
experiments on the pigments, and authored several scientific papers on the topic (Kawaguti,
1944, 1966, 1969).
SCUBA divers rediscovered fluorescence in the 1950's. Luis Marden, a photographer for
National Geographic magazine, wrote in 1956 that he noticed red anemones at a depth of 60
feet, where there should have been no red (Marden, 1956). The red color disappeared in flash
photographs, and Marden correctly guessed that the effect was due to fluorescence. Conrad
Limbaugh and Wheeler North, working at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
2