Sailors of yore used to tell tales of suddenly encountering "pale, milky, glowing waters." As it turns out, it wasn't just a fisherman's tale. In 1995, a British merchant vessel documented that the sea looked "milky-white."
Modern scientists, like Steve Haddock at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, have discovered that luminous bacteria or bio luminescent dinoflagellates are the source of the glow, though it was all still theoretical at the time of a 2005 study. A follow-up study from Haddock and three other scientists concluded that the bacteria glows to attract fish, so it can be ingested and live inside of it.
The bacteria gathers in the trillions, but scientists still don't know what caused "such a massive bacteria population explosion."
"There are still far more questions than answers surrounding milky seas," the study says. "We have gained a new sense for how very little indeed we really know about the place we call 'home.'
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