The Bizarre Beast with Glowing Bones

Chameleons are fancy lizards. They can move and focus each eye independently, they catch food with super long tongues, and they change colors! And if all that wasn't enough, new research has added something bizarre to their already impressive arsenal of color-changing abilities.

Host: Hank Green (he/him)
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Theme by Josef "Tuna" Metesh

[BizarreBeasts]

Fluorescence and the emission of light are tricky topics! Mark D. Scherz, one of the researchers from the chameleon bone-based fluorescence paper, did a great job clearly explaining the phenomenon:

[Kelly-ibhf]

Hank: Has a book coming out in a matter of days.

Also Hank: Let me start a 56th Youtube channel.

[MarkScherz]

Hullo! I am one of the scientists who described the phenomenon of chameleons' bone-based fluorescence! To answer the 'how did we find out?' question, we came across a picture by the extremely talented Paul Bertner, who often takes pictures of arthropods under UV light to photograph their fluorescence, but happened to shine one of these torches on a chameleon in Madagascar and post it on Flickr. We ran off to the collections in our museum in Munich, Germany, with a UV light, and found out that these patterns were present in practically all chameleons!
Thanks Hank for featuring our work, and celebrating these wonderfully fancy lizards!

[LtGameboy]

Chameleons also have ribs about as thick as a piece of string, that is why if you own one you NEVER pick them up, you have to let them walk on to you or else you will break its ribs. They also need both really good ventilation and high humidity, which is fairly hard to do. top that off with an animal that stresses incredibly easily, and you get a really cool animal that does not make a good beginner lizard. If you want a cool lizard for a pet you should look at blue tongue skinks, pink tongue skinks, African fat tailed geckos, crested geckos, or leopard geckos. (bearded dragons have some pretty complex dietary needs, and need really large enclosures too, so they aren't great for new keepers.)

[tinabelcher]

Major dad pun energy when he said “become it’s own...beast”

[kathrynbyers]

as a zoology major this gives me life omfg

[CoralReaper]

Chameleons are the Platypuses of the reptile world. Every time you learn something new about them, the stranger it gets.

[driverjayne]

So do all bones fluoresce under blacklight? Like if i got a gnarly injury at a blacklight roller rink and my bone was poking through my skin... would it glow?

[jaypillsbury]

Nobody:
No one:
Not a single soul:
Hank: sKiNdOw!

[susanfarley]

Every time I hear someone say "a leopard can't change it's spots" it reminds me of a saying Terry Pratchett wrote in his discworld book series. It was " a leopard can't change it's shorts". It always amuses me.

[geckomaniac]

This channel is gonna be my jam, I can feel it!

[nab-rkob]

It is so wonderful to see how many more ways there are to view color. What else are we mere humans missing!?

[sggy_nOodls]

"i like to look at chameleons, look at them with me :D" is probably my favorite line in this video

[davidonfim]

4:05 The UV light is able to get to the bones, which fluoresce under UV light- meaning that the UV light is ABSORBED, and in this case is emitted as light in the VISIBLE spectrum. To a Chamaleon, the tubercles would look ever so slightly darker/duller under normal light. Again, the UV light is being absorbed. The fact that chameleons can see into the UV does NOT mean that they are able to see fluorescence any better than we can- the fluorescence is in the visible spectrum (which we can also see!), NOT the UV spectrum.
The thing is, moonlight has nearly no UV light, so at night the tubercles would look to them just like they do to us. During the day there would also be almost no difference too, since the fluorescing effect is massively washed out by all the other light. That's why we have to put them in a room only illuminated by a UV light in order to see it.
As I already mentioned, the only difference between a human and a chameleon looking at the tubercles during daylight would be that to a chameleon, the tubercles would look slightly darker/duller in the UV spectrum, as the UV is being absorbed by the bones.

[LumosSun]

If we can recommend animals ... any sort of slug. There are the giant black california sea hares, brown sea hares, land slugs like the bright pink one from Australia, nudibranches, or even just leopard slugs are weird!

[moonbear]

Hank: "Color is a double edged sword. If you're using it to stand out, you can not also use it for camouflage."

Octopi and Cuttlefish: "What, are we just mere clams to you?!"

Not only can cephalopods change their colors in a mere blink of an eye to stand out or blend in, they can also change the texture of their skin to blend into their environment. So, they're even better than the chameleon in that regard. Can they glow in a UV light? I dunno, I haven't heard of any one trying that, but it wouldn't surprise me if they can.

[Dionysian.Cryptid]

Media has really poisoned the image of African biome diversity for me cause I really expected chameleons to be native to the South American rainforest, they just look like they belong there. But any footage of Africa I've seen is either desert or savanna.

[paulmillcamp]

After watching this, chameleons are my new favourite animal

[AS-fbec]

I very much hope your next project is some sort of "how to scicom" channel. You've done it so well and brought so many talented scientists to the public eye!

[tessaarmstrong]

Is there a way to recommend animals?
Been part of the pin club since last year, going to have an enamel pin zoo soon!