iny snails found on Australia's eastern coast can flicker their spiral shells like dim, blue-green

light bulbs.

Some snails excrete bioluminescent trails of snot or blink their muscly foot to attract mates. But
the clusterwink snail is the first discovered to use the shell-flashing trick, which seems to have
evolved as a form of self-defense.

"The snail produces light when tapped or around animals that might eat it, even while it's hiding
in its shell," said Dimitiri Deheyn, a marine biologist at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in
San Diego. Deheyn and his colleague describe the bioluminescent trick of the snail, also known
as Hinea brasiliana, in an upcoming study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The snail's glow-in-the-dark-shell trick was noticed by scientists decades ago, but until now,
nobody had any idea what chemicals are involved in generating the glow, or how the shell lights
amplifies the light.

"Pinning down what particular biomechanism the snails use to glow is going to be important for
the biotech industry," said marine biologist Mark Moline of California Polytechnic State
University, who wasn't involved in the study.

When threatened, fingernail-sized H. brasiliana generates pulses of bioluminescent light from a

single spot on its mushy body. The light pulses are variable, lasting as short as 1/50th of a second
to as long as a few seconds. But the opaque shell diffuses only the blue-green color of light it
generates – and no other color – like a highly selective frosted light bulb.

"I wondered, 'How is this possible?' If you put a blue-green laser up to the shell, the whole thing
lights up," Deheyn said.

When Deheyn and his lab hit the shell with other colors of light, there was no glow. The same
experiments performed on the shells of a sister species didn't make its shells glow using any
wavelength of light.

"It's not only the diffusion that's pronounced, but also the amplification. The opaque shell is
specific to one color, which shows a very close co-evolution of the bioluminescence and the
shell," Deheyn said.

Flashing like a light bulb in dark water may seem like a good way to attract predators, but two
different evolutionary ideas back it as an effective protective mechanism. Imagine you're a crab
scuttling for some snail food in the dark, Deheyn says, and you find a delicious meal on a rock.