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THE ocean is dark and full of terrors, and the black dragonfish is the darkest of them all.
海洋中充滿黑暗與恐懼，黑色的深海龍魚是其中最黑暗的生物。
Its surface, new measurements reveal, is as black as the blackest material known—the result of an abyssal arms race.
最新測量數據表明其表面和最黑暗的已知物質一樣黑—這是深海軍備競賽的結果。
"The trick to being really dark is to control the scattering of light," says Sonke Johnsen of Duke University, in North Carolina, who studies the dragonfish.
“黑暗是為了控制光的散射”，北卡羅來納州杜克大學研究深海龍魚的Sonke Johnsen說道。
"You have to let light into a material and let it bounce around a lot."
“需要讓光進入某種物質并讓光反射出來?！?/div>
Black velvet, for instance, appears darker than other fabrics because photons (the particles of light) skip between its fine hairs and do not escape.
比如黑天鵝絨，看上去比其他纖維物質更加黑暗，因為光子（光的微粒）在細絨毛之間跳動且不會逃脫。
Similarly, Vantablack, the least reflective artificial material, traps photons in a forest of carbon nanotubes standing on their ends.
同樣，Vantablack這種最不反光的人造材料將末端碳納米管叢中的光子困住。
It absorbs 99.965% of visible light. Objects coated in it seem to disappear, leaving behind an inky silhouette.
它可以吸收99.965%的可見光。包裹在其表面的物體好像消失了，只留下漆黑的輪廓。
Karen Osborn of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, DC,
華盛頓州史密森尼國家自然歷史博物館的凱倫·奧斯本
noticed a similar effect when she tried to photograph deep-sea fish,
發現了一種類似的效果，當時她在拍攝深海魚，
many of which are coated in a fragile black film that has to be removed before a picture can be taken. Under a scanning electron microscope,
其中很多都魚都被蓋上了一層脆弱的黑膜，在拍攝照片前需要把它拿下來。在掃描電子顯微鏡下，
she discovered that this film is made of millions of microscopic melanin granules shaped like drug capsules, capped by a thin gelatinous layer.
她發現這層膜是由百萬個藥物膠囊一樣的微觀黑素顆粒制成，這些黑色顆粒表面有一層薄薄的凝膠層。
The absorbing effect of the film is so great that instruments calibrated in the usual way cannot detect any light reflected from the fish at all.
薄膜的吸收效果很好，普通的儀器無法探測到魚反射出的任何光。
Dr Osborn's attempts to measure the light inside an empty pitch black room yielded the same result.
奧斯本博士嘗試在一間空曠漆黑的房間中測量光線，但結果也是一樣。
Eventually, she and her colleagues worked out that the dragonfish reflects just one in every 2,000 photons incident upon it—an absorbance of 99.95%.
最終，她和她的同事發現深海龍魚僅反射入射到其表面的1/2000的光—吸光度為99.95%。
Similar measurements hold true for a whole range of fishes brought up from the abyss.
類似測量值也適用于來自深海的各種魚類。
In the deepest depths of the ocean, what light could these animals be trying to avoid?
在海洋最深處，這些動物是為了躲避什么光呢？
The photic zone, which is bathed in sunlight during the day, and starlight and moonlight at night, reaches down a few hundred metres.
透光層白天沐浴在陽光之中，夜晚沐浴星光和月光，透光層低達幾百米。
Yet blacker-than-black fish are found much deeper than that. The black dragonfish, for instance, lives up to 2,000 metres beneath the surface.
但更黑的魚生活在透光層之下。例如，黑深海龍魚生活在水面兩千米之下。
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