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Whether black charcoal, black ink or a black panther - most objects still reflect enough light that we can recognize and focus on their surface structure.
In contrast to some deep sea fish.
Even in bright light, only their silhouettes appear without any further features.
So the fish are blacker than black.
An international team of researchers led by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC and Duke University in the US state of North Carolina discovered 18 such fish species in the depths of Monterey Bay, California and in the Gulf of Mexico and described them in the journal Current Biology .
It didn't matter how we set up the camera or the light - they just soaked up all of the light.
Karen Osborn, zoologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Blacker than the night: the fangfish Anoplogaster cornuta
Source: Karen Osborn, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
16 of them absorb more than 99.5 percent of the incident radiation.
The record holder among them: the deep-sea anglerfish
Oneirodes
, whose skin only reflects 0.05 percent of the light.
In doing so, he draws level with the birds of paradise of New Guinea.
Their feathers reflect just 0.05 to 0.31 percent of the radiation.
The plumage absorbs as much as the blackest, man-made material in the world: the so-called vantablack, a substance made from carbon nanotubes, swallows up to 99.965 percent of the light.
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The pigment melanin is responsible for the deep black color.
It is found in what are known as melanosomes.
These pigment packages lie close together directly under the fish's skin, so that it hardly reflects any light.
In other dark-colored fish, the pigment layer is not structured in such a seamless manner.
In order to get this photo of the fangfish of the species Anoplogaster cornuta, the researchers had to use a few tricks
Source: Karen Osborn, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
You have developed a super-efficient, super-thin light trap.
Light is not reflected, light does not penetrate.
It gets into that layer and then just goes away.
Karen Osborne, co-study author with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
In the dark deep sea, where practically no sunlight can get there, the ultra-black coloring serves as a camouflage.
The fish even absorb the light from other sea creatures generated by bioluminescence almost completely and are therefore almost invisible to predators.
This article was first published in September 2020.