Tukoi is a Melbourne-based tattoo artist who specializes in fluorescent tattoos. Read the rest “Watch these fluorescent tattoos sparkle under UV light”

Black Light Visuals travels to music concerts and lets festival-goers dip their arms into vats filled with their fluorescent dyes, leaving them with marbled appendages that glow in black light. Read the rest “Watch people turn their bodies into black light art”

The Tennessee Aquarium recently welcomed some new arrivals: fluorescent flower-hat jellies. Read the rest “Watch flower-hat jellies float around like fluorescent creatures from Avatar”

South American polka dot tree frogs are pretty cool, but Julián Faivovich and Carlos Taboada found out they are even cooler when an ultraviolet flashlight is trained on them. They fluoresce.

Many animals can see beyond the spectrum visible to humans, and these frogs adapted with this trait. From the abstract:

Fluorescence, the absorption of short-wavelength electromagnetic radiation reemitted at longer wavelengths, has been suggested to play several biological roles in metazoans. This phenomenon is uncommon in tetrapods, being restricted mostly to parrots and marine turtles. We report fluorescence in amphibians, in the tree frog Hypsiboas punctatus, showing that fluorescence in living frogs is produced by a combination of lymph and glandular emission, with pigmentary cell filtering in the skin. The chemical origin of fluorescence was traced to a class of fluorescent compounds derived from, here named hyloins. We show that fluorescence contributes 18−29% of the total emerging light under twilight and nocturnal scenarios, largely enhancing brightness of the individuals and matching the sensitivity of night vision in amphibians. These results introduce an unprecedented source of pigmentation in amphibians and highlight the potential relevance of fluorescence in visual perception in terrestrial environments.

I'd make a Wikipedia article about dihydroisoquinolinone, but it would probably be an annoying and demoralizing fight.

• Naturally occurring fluorescence in frogs (via Nature) Read the rest “Fancy flashlight finds first fluorescent frog”

John Poppleton demonstrates how he creates eye-popping body-painted landscapes using fluorescent paint and UV light. Below are a couple of examples: Read the rest “WATCH: Black light body painting timelapse”