Introduction to Bioluminescence

Bioluminescent Bay, or Biobay, is an anomaly of the world.  It is here, in Puerto Rico, that bioluminescence can be easily viewed.  This bay has 720,000 bioluminescent organisms per gallon of water!  These creatures are responsible for lighting up Biobay at night.  This picture below is just one of the fantastic sights that bioluminescence provides. 

The motion of the kayak is triggering the creatures in the water into lighting up and giving a bioluminescent show (10).  But what is bioluminescence?  Bioluminescence is the emission of light by organisms.  This process is a sub-category of chemiluminescence.  These creatures carry out a chemical reaction in their bodies.  The intermediate products of this reaction are excited and then emit light (8).  The Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute found that between the depths of 200 to 1,000 meters, over ninety percent of organisms living there utilize bioluminescence (7).  While fluorescence and phosphorescence just re-emit light at different wavelengths, bioluminescence produces the excited molecule without external energy as a factor.  These three processes are comparable because their emission spectrums are similar.  However, fluorescence and phosphorescence occurs in organisms too, but they are not the same as bioluminescence (4).