(calming music)
- I was in the Solomon Islands on a
National Geographic
expedition. We were working
in a shallow reef and
we had a big blue light
that we were filming fluorescent corals.
One of the safety
divers, Brendan Phillips,
came up to me and just
started tugging on my
camera and basically just gave me
the message, you know, follow me.
So I turn off my lights, I followed him
for several hundred meters in the dark.
Suddenly, I see why he pulled me there.
There are literally thousands of blue,
blinking bioluminescent lights.
And they were coming together,
and they were joining,
and there would be circles of them,
and it was almost like
a blue, bioluminescent
brick road just descending
down the reef, making
all these shapes. It's
the closest thing I've
ever had to an Avatar moment.
This is the largest
aggregation of Flashlight Fish
that I believe humans
have ever come across.
These animals, they don't
even come out when the
moon is out. They're
so sensitive to light.
Because they're so easily
gobbled up by a bigger predator.
So it has this subocular
bioluminescent organ
under its eye, and it
grows, like a garden,
these bioluminescent bacteria.
And it grows them in
these tubes and it even
projects the light outward.
It's even grown this
vasculature to feed,
to pump oxygen, to keep
these bioluminescent
bacteria glowing bright.
One thing that they do is
when they're actually eating,
they will keep their light
on so they can see the food.
So they're very visual creatures.
And they're using their light to feed.
But when they're not
feeding, they're using
their light to be able
to move in a school.
A quarter of all fish species,
some time in their life, they school.
And there's all kinds of
benefits to schooling.
There's safety in numbers,
and it makes it harder
for a predator to really
zone in on one specific fish.
What's unique about these animals is
the relationship they have
with this bioluminescent
bacteria that they harvest in their eye.
Only nine species have this ability.
We do know that they do
something called a blink and run.
When they want to evade
a predator, they will
start swimming in one direction, blink,
and then immediately turn
in the other direction.
So a predator trying to follow
in the dark will lose it.
Recording this and
proving this opens up the
possibility that the deep sea is filled
with billions of
bioluminescent schooling fish
and us humans have just not seen this yet,
because we're not in the deep sea
with all our lights off.
