There are fist-sized shrimp-like crustaceans in the twilight zone. The best way to see in the dark is by taking up most of the head. The bigger you are, the more likely you are to catch a photon that's out there.
The ocean is a wild place. Sometimes it seems to border on the absurd, from fish that look up through transparent heads to golden snails with iron armour. We know a lot more about deep space than we do about the deep ocean. As mining companies push to industrialise the sea floor and global leaders squabble over how to protect the high seas, a new Guardian Seascape series will profile some of the most recently discovered weird, wonderful, majestic, ridiculous, hardcore and mind blowing creatures. They show how little is known about the environment on Earth.Q&AShow
It is a big challenge for animals living in deep midwater to not be seen by other people. The game is similar to playing hide and seek on a football field. There isn't anything to hide behind. Prey can either make out in the dim twilight zone illumination or in the beams of their own bio-luminescent searchlights if they have dark eyes. The huge eyes of cystisoma are hidden. Instead of concentrating the pigments in a small area, they spread their retina into a thin sheet of small red dots that are too small for most animals to see. Most of the rest of the body is hidden by cystisoma. They look like empty, palm-sized gaps between other animals when scientists empty them into a bucket of sea water. You can't see these things until you remove them from the water.
The orderly, structured way in which the tissues are arranged makes most of the internal organs clear. She says that they can't seem to do it with their gut. Beneath the eyes, there is a golden structure. While Cystisoma hangs in its horizontal position, this is stacked tall and straight to cast a shadow.
The light that reflects off the transparent bodies of these crustaceans makes them hard to spot underwater. Under an electron microscope, parts of the cystisoma are covered in small protuberances. Some parts are covered in a single layer of spherical shapes, which the scientists think could be colonies of an unknown type ofbacteria. Light is 100 times more likely to pass through Cystisoma if it is reflected into the eye of a predator. It works the same way as an anti-reflective coating.
The anti-reflection shag-pile covering and sphere-covered joints on cystisoma's legs help them catch the light as they flick and wriggle about. The guys are masters of transparent camouflaging. When the Cystisoma actually wants to be found, what will happen? The crustaceans need to reproduce together. The Cystisoma is covered in structures that detect chemicals in the water, which is a clue as to how mates find each other. The two people are actually smelling each other.
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