Courtney Whitcher is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist studying biofluorescent frogs. She thinks glowing might be a “secret communication channel” that lets frogs talk to one another without predators seeing. Frogs have unique eyes that let them see the color of the emitted light. They glow the most at twilight, which is when the amphibians are most active and already talking with one another.
Whitcher first visited the rainforest on a high school trip to Costa Rica. “I experienced a night hike in the rainforest and fell in love with the environment,” she says. That led her to pursue a career in ecology. Today Whitcher is a graduate student at Florida State University, and she gets to do field research in the rainforest every year!
“Each day of research starts with going out at night to look for frogs,” she says. Whitcher scans ponds and tree branches, hoping to spot a frog to catch and bring back to her camp. Once she has a specimen, she holds the critter under a special lamp called an excitation light. She then peers at the frog through filtering goggles. The goggles allow her to see only the light from the frog’s biofluoresence. She can then record the color and brightness of the frog’s glow. Since 2017, Whitcher and other researchers have recorded biofluorescence in more than 150 frog species in South America.
Whitcher loves sharing her fascination with biofluorescence. Seeing the world in a new way is her favorite part of her research. “We are living in, and surrounded by, a glowing fluorescent world just waiting to be discovered,” she says.
