Article Review: Salamanders and other amphibians are aglow with biofluorescence

Biofluorescence is always something that has interested me ever since I visited a bioluminescent bay in Puerto Rico. So when I saw the article "Salamanders and other amphibians are aglow with biofluorescence" published in Nature I knew I had to do my article review on it! Authors Jennifer Lamb and Matthew Davis describe how their research shows that biofluorescence is widespread across amphibians. Biofluorescence is when an organisms absorbs wavelengths of light and then reemitts them at lower energy wavelengths. This study mainly focused on Caudata and found that they fluoresce green to yellow under both blue and ultra-violet light as seen in the figure below.

It was particularly interesting that they found that biofluorescence emitted was more intense under blue light that ultra-violet light. This is important as there is little known about biofluorescence in tetrapods, as most research focuses on marine animals. In addition, only one salamander previous to this study was known to emit bioflourescence under ultra violet light. They specifically found that fluorescence is found in multiple families of salamanders, and suggest that biofluorescence most likely appeared early in the evolution of amphibians. These findings allow for future studies to investigate both the ecological and evolutionary role of biofluorescence.


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-59528-9