14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists in Hawaii and Turkey have engineered a pair of rabbits that stand to give Rudolph's very bright nose a run for its money.
Long story short, the researchers have successfully created rabbits that glow in the dark.
Daily Mail reports that, when exposed to light, the rodents look not in the least different from other representatives of their species.
However, when the lights are turned off, the rabbits change their color to fluorescent green. “These rabbits are like a light bulb glowing, like an LED light all over their body,” the researchers say.
Check out the picture next to this article to see just how shiny these animals are.
The researchers explain that the two glow-in-the-dark rabbits are part of a litter of eight. Still, they are the only ones to display this peculiar feature.
According to the same source, the scientists who worked on this project created the fluorescent green animals by injecting foreign genetic material into rabbit embryos.
The fact that the rodents ended up sporting said odd color when left in the dark indicates that the embryos have accepted the foreign genetic material and have incorporated it into the rodents' natural genetic makeup.
“It’s just a marker to show that we can take a gene that was not originally in the animal and now exists in the animal,” Dr. Stefan Moisyadi, a researcher at the University of Hawaii, explains.
The same specialist argues that, until now, the rabbits have not shown any signs of ill health that might be attributed to the fact that their bodies pack unfamiliar genetic material.
What's more, it appears that the rodents' lifespan is the same as that of their normal siblings.
These experiments were not the first of the kind. Thus, in this year's April, researchers in Uruguay went public with the news that they had created sheep that glow green when exposed to UV light.