The 27 Best Deep-Sea Species: #8 Red Lure Jellyfish

#8: Erenna sp. (Phylum: Cnidaria, Class: Hydrozoa, Order: Siphonophorae, Family:Agalmatidae )

Roxanne..You don’t have to put on the red light..Those days are over…You don’t have to eat something else’s body in the night.

Perhaps one of the coolest uses of biolumenscence occurs in the genus Erenna. As Steve Haddock, fellow MBARIan and expert on all luminescent, notes "Of all the luminous organisms in the sea, only a few are thought to use light to lure prey, and fewer still have been known to make red light." The red light occurs at the end of modified tentacle tips that when flicked closely resemble copepods. Don’t swim toward the light little fishy! You can proceed to Steve’s page, where I gratuitously stole the pictures here from, and get more information, scientific papers, and see VIDEO!