Invisible Fish?
Cloaking and invisibility are topics that Nick and I have talked about to see how to include them in our story. You’ll see what we came up with eventually. Discovery News reported a new Nature article about some species of fish that are able to bend light with their skin layers to such an extent that they aren’t reflective. Basically they can become almost invisible to other fish.
From the DN article:
The fish’s skin contains multilayer arrangements of reflective guanine crystals… It was previously thought that fish skin would fully polarize light when reflected. As the light becomes polarized, there should then be a drop in reflectivity…The researchers found that the skin of sardines and herring contain not one but two types of guanine crystal. Each has different optical properties. By mixing these two types, the fish’s skin doesn’t polarize the reflected light and maintains its high reflectivity.
Essentially, the fish have multiple layers that work together to cancel out both reflection and polarization of light that hits them. Pretty awesome, and easily applicable to current (or futuristic) cloaking devices.
Fish Can Cloak, Become Invisible to Predators : Discovery News.
Also, here’s the link to the Nature article (paywalled beyond the abstract)