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June 2, 2009 10:43 AM

I ran across a variety of shrimp a few years ago when I was trying to figure out if there was any known way for bigfoot to make it’s eyes glow. The shrimp I found, called snapping shrimp, or pistol shrimp, make a noise with their claws that will also create light. Until today, I had been having trouble locating the source for that information again. Here’s an article that discusses this effect from NationalGeographic.com circa2001:

A year ago, a team of European scientists revealed that the sound is caused by the bursting of a bubble that forms when a shrimp snaps its claw shut. Now, the team reports that the bubble emits not only sound but a flash of light—indicating the extreme temperature and pressure inside the bubbles before they burst.

I have to confess, I had not noted the “extreme temperature and pressure” part when I made this association. Seems a high hurdle to get over. The principle working here is sonoluminscence, or the production of light via sound.

The flashing phenomenon is thought to be similar to sonoluminescence, in which bubbles that are in a liquid driven by a strong sound field emit light.

In sonoluminescence, the peak intensity of the emitted light is at a short wavelength. This indicates that the temperature inside the bubble is at least 10,000 degrees Kelvin (18,000 degrees Fahrenheit).

We can probably get a strong sound field, and a liquid (the salt water inside the eye) but I don’t know if we can handle that 18,000 Fahrenheit.

So while this theory is tantalizing, it appears to be, if you’ll pardon the pun, dead in the water as an explanation for self luminous eyes in bigfoot and other strange creatures.

There, now back to work..

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