Gruber and his team set out to find the little green mystery in the wild. We'd never seen anything like it," says Gruber, a research associate at the museum and a marine biologist at the City University of New York.
"It was so extremely fluorescent it didn't seem real. But in one image, a small, bright green eel pierced the darkness. While designing an exhibit for New York City's American Museum of Natural History, Gruber made hundreds of photographs of the same coral reef by day and by night to capture its fluorescent glow, a phenomenon common for those varieties of coral. That's why when he's on land, Gruber designs technology to revolutionize ocean exploration, such as special photography equipment to capture fluorescent light that the human eye can't normally see.Īn accidental discovery set his research in motion. Some of these unusual animals, he thinks, might hold keys to medical breakthroughs.īut first we have to identify them. Gruber's work offers another reason to save ocean life that we are just beginning to appreciate and understand. It's an underwater display that had never been seen before.Īnd it's not just beautiful. His expeditions have turned up hundreds of shimmering creatures, all showing off for one another with a mysterious fluorescence.
Editor's Note: David Gruber is one of National Geographic's 2014 Emerging Explorers, a program that honors tomorrow's visionaries-those making discoveries, making a difference, and inspiring people to care about the planet.ĭavid Gruber found a secret world under the sea-and it glows.
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