Some Small Shrimp are Unseen

Some feller was investigating shrimp — oh, wait. Kathryn Feller (I got it right, now) was investigating the larvae of mantis shrimp. They are mostly transparent, except for their eyes, which reflect colors. The amazing thing is that they can become almost entirely invisible, as if they had a cloaking device.

As expected, the researchers ruined good observational science by invoking evolution to explain their findings. Actually, they conflated natural selection with evolution. They should know better, since natural selection is not evolution. And no, there's no way they'd saddle up on design as an explanation, even though that's a reasonable conclusion.

To figure out how the shrimp larvae hide their eyes, Kathryn Feller collected mantis shrimp larvae from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. In her lab, exposed to ordinary white light, the shrimp glowed blue-green. “The whole sphere of the retina at the centre of the eye reflects this sparkly blue-green light,” she says. “It’s quite brilliant.”

Feller measured the spectra of this eyeshine reflected from several species of shrimp larvae. Some, like Pseudosquillana richeri and a Harpiosquilla larva, bounced back blue-green light with “very discrete peaks in that region of the spectrum.” Another species, Pullosquilla thomassini, reflected light in two different colors—green from the top part of the eyes and blue from the bottom. Spectral analysis confirmed this to be a distinctive characteristic of the species. “We suspect that it is something similar to counter shading,” Feller says. “Perhaps the dorsal part of the eye is held against background that is greenish and the ventral part of the eye is more bluish.”

You can read the rest by clicking on "Biological Cloaking Device Renders Shrimp Larvae Invisible".