EXCLUSIVE: "Glowing" Sea Turtle Discovered | National Geographic

Wait, what did you find?

We found a biofluorescent turtle! The scientists have only really tuned in to biofluorescence in the last 10 years, and as soon as we started tuning into it, we started to find it everywhere. First, it was in corals and jellyfish, then it was in fish, and there it was, this UFO! This turtle was just hanging out with us. It was so, it was in love with the lights. It was just hanging out with us, and it was glowing neon yellow.

Yeah, this is the first, the first I've ever seen of a biofluorescent turtle. Spectacular!

That’s okay, so drop down.

Alright, we're going in. I was in the Solomon Islands on a TBA 21 Academy Expedition, which is a new group that pairs up artists and scientists to do different projects related to the marine environment. I'm taking pictures of some corals that we already knew were biofluorescent, and then in the middle, I guess maybe 40 minutes into the dive, out of the blue, it almost looks like a bright red and green spaceship, you know, came underneath my camera.

The only animal that I can really tell you definitively has two colors is corals. You know, we found lots of fluorescence in marine eels, and it's all green fluorescence, and lots of fluorescence in gobies, and that's mainly red fluorescence. So, until we actually get a hold of one of these turtles and really start to look at it chemically, we wouldn't know what it is.

Beautiful stripes, you know, green across the head, across the back. Um, it just bumped into us. It just basically—I was filming coral and then it came in front of my lens and then hung out with us for like minutes—3 minutes, 5 minutes, something like that. And then he went down super calm.

I mean, I've never seen a turtle that calm. I've never seen... I wanted to let him go after a little bit. I felt like he came and he divulged a secret that was enough. It was enough to get this first little bit of footage, which really shows that turtles are biofluorescent.

Now, it opens up all these new questions for us of what is it doing in these turtles? We know they have really good vision; they go under these long and arduous migrations. But how are they using this? Are they using it to find each other, or are they using it to attract each other?

What's even more sad, I think about this, is that these turtles have such a storied history, and now they're critically endangered. There's some places where there's just a few thousand breeding females remaining.