“Then the males, homing in on the light of the females, come streaking up from the bottom like comets-they luminesce, too. “The female worms come up from the bottomnd swim quickly in tight little circles as they glow, which looks like a field of little cerulean stars across the surface of jet black water,” Siddall explains in a statement. Mark Siddall, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology and co-author of a new study published in PLOS One, describes the arresting sight of the critters’ copulation: In the 1930s, scientists realized that Columbus’ mysterious sighting aligned with the mating behavior of the Bermuda fireworm ( Odontosyllis enopla), which lives throughout the Caribbean. It is believed that Christopher Columbus and his crew caught a glimpse of the amorous creatures on October 11, 1492, as they approached San Salvador island in his diaries, Columbus mentions “the flame of a small candle alternately raised and lowered” in the dark waters. The spectacular and precisely timed mating habits of the Bermuda fireworm have been historically well documented. And now, as Brandon Specktor reports for Live Science, researchers have unlocked the secret to the fireworms’ green glow: a special enzyme that has not been seen in any other bioluminescent animals. On the third night after the full moon in summer and fall, at 22 minutes after sunset, tiny marine invertebrates known as Bermuda fireworms light up the Caribbean in a bioluminescent mating ritual.
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