• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Blue Sharks’ Freaky Tooth-Skin Makes It Possible For Them To Change Color To Green And Even Gold

July 9, 2025 by Deborah Bloomfield

Sharks have teeth on their skin. It’s a weird idea to get your head around, we know, but that’s not even the big news. New research has revealed that the pulp found within the adapted gnashers on sharks’ skin may enable them to change color.

The shark in question is the blue shark (Prionace glauca), famous for being, well, blue. Doesn’t seem so impressive for an animal with such a name, but it’s hard to find true blue in the natural world.

“Blue is one of the rarest colours in the animal kingdom, and animals have developed a variety of unique strategies through evolution to produce it, making these processes especially fascinating,” said Dr Viktoriia Kamska, a post-doctoral researcher in the lab of Professor Mason Dean at City University of Hong Kong, in a statement.

The new research has revealed a unique nanostructure in blue sharks’ toothy skin that not only explains their iconic coloration but also suggests they can change color. It all comes down to their strange dermal denticles, a derived tooth-like scale that effectively gives sharks a kind of armor. Like other teeth, they have pulp cavities and they contain guanine crystals and melanosomes. The guanine is a mirror for blue, while melanosomes absorb other wavelengths of light.

A blue sharks' dazzling dermal denticles.

A blue shark’s dazzling dermal denticles.

Image credit: Dr Viktoriia Kamska

“When you combine these materials together, you also create a powerful ability to produce and change colour,” explained Professor Dean. “What’s fascinating is that we can observe tiny changes in the cells containing the crystals and see and model how they influence the colour of the whole organism.”

As well as explaining what makes the blue shark so darn blue, it also appears that through the same mechanism, that blue can change color to greens and even golds. This is the result of space changes between the layers of guanine crystals within the dental pulp cavities, with a tighter squeeze being bluer, while more space gives more green.

What’s perhaps most intriguing of all is that the space changes can be mediated by environmental changes. One example the researchers give is greater depth, whereby the water pressure would increase, squeezing together the layers and creating a deeper blue. This could be beneficial to the sharks as it makes them more camouflaged where light levels are low.

Fascinating stuff for shark fans, and also something for the biomimeticists to get excited about.

a blue shark in water looking very blue

Just a blue shark doing what blue sharks do (look blue).

Image credit: Pommeyrol Vincent / Shutterstock.com

“Not only do these denticles provide sharks with hydrodynamic and antifouling benefits, but we’ve now found that they also have a role in producing and maybe changing colour too,” said Professor Dean. “Such a multi-functional structural design – a marine surface combining features for high-speed hydrodynamics and camouflaging optics – as far as we know, hasn’t been seen before.”

“As nanofabrication tools get better, this creates a playground to study how structures lead to new functions. We know a lot about how other fishes make colours, but sharks and rays diverged from bony fishes hundreds of millions of years ago – so this represents a completely different evolutionary path for making colour.”

This research is being presented at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Antwerp, Belgium, on July 9, 2025.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Russia moves Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets to Belarus to patrol borders, Minsk says
  2. French senators to visit Taiwan amid soaring China tensions
  3. Thought Unicorns Don’t Exist? Turns Out They Live In A Chinese Cave
  4. The Largest Solar Power Plant In The World Just Got Switched On

Source Link: Blue Sharks’ Freaky Tooth-Skin Makes It Possible For Them To Change Color To Green And Even Gold

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • “I Saved A PNG Image To A Bird”: YouTuber Stores 176KB Drawing Of A Bird Inside A Bird’s Song
  • The Falkland Islands Wolf: The Tragic Tale Of The First Known Canid Humans Drove To Extinction
  • There’s A Forever Chemical That’s In Your Water, Food, And Blood — And Levels Are “Increasing Irreversibly”
  • “World’s Rarest Bear” Captured On Camera In Mongolian Desert – With A Baby!
  • Alligators Eat Rocks For An Incredibly Smart Reason
  • New Study Raises “Disturbing Prospect” About Alien Civilizations Using Dyson Swarms
  • The Khamar-Daban Incident Is So Strange It Is Known As “Buryatia’s Dyatlov Pass”
  • Zebroids, Zeedonks, Zorses, Zonies: Welcome To The World Of Zebra Hybrids
  • How Far Into The Universe Can You See With Your Naked Eye?
  • “Rarest Baryon Decay Ever Observed So Far” Found In Experiment That Wasn’t Even Looking For It
  • Scientists “Read Minds” By Opening The Brain’s “Filing Cabinet” Of Memories
  • 4,000-Year-Old Ancient Egyptian Handprint Discovered On “Soul House” Tomb Offering
  • Dogs Can Smell Parkinson’s Disease Years Before Symptoms Appear With Incredible Accuracy
  • The Longest-Reigning Monarch
  • Adorable Boxer Crabs Filmed “Cloning” Their Living Anemone Gloves For The First Time
  • Watch An Adorable Little Crab Hitch A Ride On A Mosaic Jellyfish Through The Gulf Of Thailand
  • COVID Vaccines Saved An Incredible 2.5 Million Lives In The First 4 Years Of The Pandemic
  • NASA Has Made A Sizable Error In Lunar And Martian Physics, Study Suggests
  • Disappearing Stars In The 1950s Associated With UAPs And Nuclear Weapons Tests
  • These Are The “New Seasons” Scientists Think Are Emerging Because Of Climate Change
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version