Biofluorescent snailfish brave Arctic waters with built-in antifreeze
Penicillin, gunpowder, and the microwave are three of the most important scientific discoveries that were made by accident. Now, natural antifreeze can be added to the list by a team of scientists looking at how some animals survive in the bitter Arctic. According to a recent study that was just published in the journal Evolutionary Bioinformatics, a tiny snailfish species that lives in Greenland has extremely high amounts of antifreeze proteins that enable it to survive in extremely cold temperatures. In 2019, study coauthor David Gruber, a renowned biology professor at CUNY's Baruch College and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, went on an excursion to eastern Greenland to seek for creatures that shone in the dark beneath the ice. This part of Greenland, which is located in the Arctic Circle, experiences nearly uninterrupted summertime sunlight but is completely dark during the winter. The team's objective was to comprehend how light a...