It's not even an early academic word; by its construction you can see that it postdates the period when scientists would have been expected to know Greek or Latin. etymonline dates it to 1909.
There are some interesting mentions in the "history" section of the wikipedia article:
> In 1920, the American zoologist E. Newton Harvey published a monograph, The Nature of Animal Light, summarizing early work on bioluminescence. Harvey notes that Aristotle mentions light produced by dead fish and flesh, and that both Aristotle and Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History) mention light from damp wood.
> He records that Robert Boyle experimented on these light sources, and showed that both they and the glowworm require air for light to be produced. Harvey notes that in 1753, J. Baker identified the flagellate Noctiluca "as a luminous animal" "just visible to the naked eye", and in 1854 Johann Florian Heller (1813–1871) identified strands (hyphae) of fungi as the source of light in dead wood.
Had there been a term in common use, it probably would have been adopted for scientific use too. But if for some reason that didn't happen, it looks like The Nature of Animal Light would be your best bet for finding out what peasants called it.
I suspect that Aristotle and Pliny the Elder both called it "light", and that would be my first guess for what English miners and fishermen called it too.
fsckboy•5h ago
non tropical, colder in winter than Seattle, warmer in summer, the waters of New England have a fair amount of bioluminescence. you can see it brushing your hand through the water, at the tips of oars, etc (only in the dark)
unlike the dinoflagellates in this video (which are eukaryotes she calls algae, not sure if algae have flagella? looked it up "dinoflagellates are not classified as plants; they are unicellular protists that can exhibit both plant-like and animal-like characteristics. Some dinoflagellates are photosynthetic, using sunlight to produce energy, while others are heterotrophic, consuming other organisms for nutrients.") from somebody whoi oughta know I was told for the east coast it's ctenaphores (the c is cilent) the largest mini creatures that use cilia to move. just looking on wikipedia, apparently to cope with feeding themselves they also eat copepods which can also be bioluminescent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctenophora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copepod
adrian_b•3h ago
Most unicellular algae have flagella.
By phylogeny, there are several separate kinds of algae, which are not closely related and which have appeared as a consequence of separate symbiosis events.
After diatoms, dinoflagellates are among the most abundant unicellular algae. The chloroplasts of both diatoms and dinoflagellates have their origin in red algae that had been incorporated as intracellular symbionts in a distant past.