Glow-In-The-Dark Surf Explained

Red tide at night is a sailor's delight. Red tide in morning, sailors take warning. That's not exactly how the mariner rhyme goes, but it should. Often along the California coastline as well as elsewhere in places where conditions encourage plankton blooms from single-celled dinoflagellates the sea turns brownish-red during the day, but at night becomes an ocean of bioluminescent beauty.

Scientists have long known that this type of bioluminescence occurs when billions of dinoflagellates get jostled. In 2005, the Naval Research Laboratory identified the first satellite image of bioluminescence spanning hundreds of miles - confirming ancient mariner lore of sailing on glowing seas for nights at time.

But a scientific explanation for how the tiny plankton glow in the dark has remained elusive.

Until now.

The key to the dinoflagellate process is the existence of voltage-gated or voltage-sensitive proton channels. These channels form in the membranes that separate one compartment of a cell from another, but it takes certain chemicals or electrical signals to open them. Researchers long assumed that these channels probably existed in dinoflagellates, but this week biologists reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences successful identification and testing of dinoflagellate genes similar to the genes for voltage-sensitive proton channels known previously in humans, mice and sea squirts.

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