Sep 30, 2011 10:19am

Red flow at Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, Calif. North County Times/Zuma Press/Newscom

It's prizewinning seen at night.  In the Pacific Ocean soured San Diego, group of protoctist hit bloomed to modify what's famous as a red tide.

By and large, it is not thoughtful a beatific thing. The protoctist are sometimes toxic. They crapper modify seek or decease them of oxygen.

But then ground are grouping assembling to look, and ground are whatever biologists impressed by it? Because it's blue.

Peter Franks, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the portion cause feat it, Lingulodinium polyedrum, was his "favorite dinoflagellate."

Why so? "Because it's intensely bioluminescent," he wrote on the journal Deep-Sea News. "When jostled, apiece cause will provide soured a winkle of chromatic reddened created by a chemical activity within the cell. When zillions and zillions of cells are jostled — say, by a breaking gesture — you intend a earnestly impressive winkle of light."

Luckily for those who same dinoflagellates, we're nearby to a newborn moon. The chromatic feel is commonly pretty faint, prizewinning seen when it's very, rattling Stygian (though the chemical activity happens at every hours). During the day, the algal develop commonly makes the liquid murky, with pigments that crapper invoke the liquid reddish-brown.

It also crapper create quite a stench, though biologists feature the humour are innocuous for swimming. They go so farther as to declare that you incurvation up whatever liquid in a render jar, stir it and check it feel (we'll hit to consortium them if we don't springy nearby the Southern Calif. coast).

"Oooo," wrote a mortal on Twitter. "Electric-blue luminous phytoplankton! Put it in a bottleful and stir to waken the dinoflagellates. SHINY!"

Photographer Kevin Baird posted an eerie ikon on Flickr with the caption, "This is SpongeBob's aurora borealis."

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