No adequate measures to avoid the undesirable orange coloration frequently encountered in the skipjack canning industry' are known. Finding that the orange colored meat contains an intensely blue fluorescent substance, its properties were studied.
The darker the orange coloration, the more intense is the fluorescence observed, thus suggesting that this phenomenon may be useful in measuring the degree of orange coloration. The fluorescent substances were stable on heating with strong mineral acid and caustic alkali, insoluble in chloroform and other organic solvents and nonprecipitable with trichloroacetic acid or ammonium sulfate. The fluorescence was most intense at pH 4.3. On paper chromatograms, the fluorescent substance appears to be a mixture of several homologues.