Newswise — Although reindeer noses aren’t typically red, or infused with enough light to guide a sleigh, Farber says other earthly creatures are that color and glow through bioluminescence or fluorescence — everything from jelly fish to sea anemones to the zebrafish he studies. If genetic material from one of those organisms found a way into Rudolph’s DNA, Farber supposes he, too, could glow red — or at least a certain protuberance on his face could.
How might that happen? Say Rudolph’s mother, while pregnant, came upon Anthozoan coral, a brilliantly red species found in shallow tropical waters. And say she cut herself on the coral. Coral DNA might have entered her bloodstream, Farber says. In a one-in-a-million event, only slightly more likely than running into a flying reindeer, the coral DNA might have moved from her blood into a virus-like genetic element that transferred it into the egg cell that formed Rudolph.
