Reef Musing: Are fish and other marine life affected by Northern Lights?

[JoJosReef]

Now a musing of the effects of the aurora on werewolves…

Reef Werewolves (wolf eels, obviously). Let's stay on topic, please.

 

[Tripod1404]

That's the numbers I saw earlier

However, if the moon affects things like spawning events, presumably through some sort of detection of photosynthetic light, could the northern lights cause some events as well?

They would probably detect the light, but my guess is they will not respond to it. All organisms have some short of biological clock to track the passage of time. They use celestial events to calibrate & synchronize their biological clock, such as breeding, but I doubt an event is self would be able to induce breeding if it is outside the usual anticipated cycle.

So the corals would not be anticipating a full moon, and therefore wont respond. If it happened at a regular basis, their biological clock would calibrate & synchronize to it and they will start responding. But something that happens auroras are too unpredictable for an organisms to synchronize with.

 

[PharmrJohn]

Uh the moon provides like 1/400,000 the luminance of the sun…. That’s like replacing your radion with a digital watch

Yep. If I remember correctly, the magnitude of the moon is about -12. The Sun is -26. That's not to say the moon is half as bright as the Sun. It's on a logarithmic scale. There's some info from my first astronomy class 42 years ago!