Sea creatures fight bioluminescence with the blackest materials known

A dragonfish unveiled THE ocean is dark and full of terrors, and the black dragonfish is the darkest of them all. Its surface, new measurements reveal, is as black as the blackest material known--the result of an abyssal arms race. "The trick to being really dark is to control the scattering of light," says Sönke Johnsen of Duke University, in North Carolina, who studies the dragonfish. "You have to let light into a material and let it bounce around a lot." Black velvet, for instance, appears d...