Tiny structures in dragonfish teeth turn them into invisible daggers
The translucent chompers probably help surprise prey
In the deep sea, dragonfish lure smaller fish near their gaping jaws with beardlike attachments capped with a light. But the teeth of the pencil-sized predators don’t gleam in that glow.
Instead, dragonfish teeth are transparent and hard to see, thanks to nanoscale structures that reduce the amount of light scattered by the teeth, researchers report June 5 in Matter.
The clear daggers vanish into the animals’ dark mouths, probably to help dragonfish surprise their prey, says study coauthor Marc Meyers, a materials scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “They are mini-monsters of the ocean.”