London - A team of scientists is setting out today to discover the secrets of fish that live in total darkness thousands of metres below the surface of the ocean. An international research cruise is to leave Empress Dock at Southampton Oceanography Centre on the RRS Discovery, bound for the Cape Verde Islands, off the west coast of Africa.
A team of biologists was to explore why and how animals that live in the dark produce bioluminescence (light that deep-sea fish produce themselves.) They are to study how the light was created and why some fish produced different colours.