The receptorwaves are not going through, Mr. Teufel.

It turns out, almost every species in the upper parts of the ocean in warm parts of the world have these same photoreceptors, and use sunlight as the source of their energy and communication.

These were evolved in very different times we'd like to actually change those programs.

So we made molecules that look kind of like the real molecules which you saw but they're a little bit different.

When the molecule increases to a certain amount which says something about the number of cells it locks down into that receptor and information comes into the cells that tells the cells to turn on this collective behavior of making light.

What that does is to confer exquisite species specificities to these languages.

And the bacteria also have a receptor on their cell surface that fits like a lock and key with that molecule.

Maybe not surprisingly, in the deep ocean, where it's mostly blue, the photoreceptors tend to see blue light.

And then as the cells grow, they're all releasing that molecule into the environment, so there's lots of molecule there.

So, they have a second enzyme that makes a second signal and it has its own receptor, and this molecule is the trade language of bacteria.

The other thing that surprised us quite a bit is these photoreceptors detect different wavelengths of light, and we can predict that based on their amino acid sequence.