The fact that living creatures produce sounds is not particularly startling, nor is the fact that they emit smells. But light is another affair. It is just as incorporeal, but there is something uncanny about the idea of organisms creating light, as if occult powers were at play. Such beings are so rare in human experience, and their habitats so distant and fragile, that they can even seem exotically angelic — or, in some cases, demonic.


A thoroughly engrossing exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History that opens on Saturday — “Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence” — teaches us quite a bit about the phenomenon. Yet it still manages to preserve that otherworldly mystery, even cherishing it — treating it as if it were one of those ecologically vulnerable bioluminescent bays of glowing plankton in the Caribbean by whose shimmer visitors could once read in the middle of the night.


By the time you make your way from the opening gallery’s depiction of glowing mushrooms on the forest floor; through a survey of some of the 2,000 species of fireflies and the coded language of their signaling lanterns; past evocations of the bright strands of glowworms hanging from the walls in the Waitomo caves of New Zealand; and into the pitch blackness of the deep sea where the anglerfish swims, a luminous bulb of bacteria dangling above its head to lure prey into its gaping jaws, you will have a pretty good sense of this world and its strangeness.


You will also know something about the chemical reactions that create bioluminescent light; learn that though infrequently encountered on land, perhaps 90 percent of ocean creatures below a half-mile are bioluminescent; and gain newfound respect for the complexities of jellyfish. But you still will not have lost a sense of amazement, which is no small achievement for an exhibition.


This show’s curator, John Sparks, an ichthyologist at the museum, has done diving and research that have brought us information about some of these creatures, and he has shaped a compelling sequence of explorations. The museum’s exhibition department, under David Harvey, has created a hushed, dimly lighted habitat throughout, recreating the conditions under which any bioluminescence is actually seen. The galleries are also draped in a mellifluous New Age-ish soundscape of compositions created by Tom Phillips. In some galleries iPads are mounted to allow more extensive explanations than the brief informative labels.


The show was created in collaboration with the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and the Field Museum in Chicago.


The one real weakness is that with only a few exceptions — like the tanks of blinking “splitfin flashlight fish” found in deep reefs of the South Pacific — this is not an exhibition of specimens but of simulations. How else could we examine closely the way a ponyfish, swimming near the Indonesian coast, glows from within, its light coming from a ring of tissue packed with bioluminescent bacteria? Or get a look at hundreds of hanging strands of mucus glimmering from the secretions of glowworm larvae in a New Zealand cave? Or learn how different species of fireflies have different patterns of blinking?


In the last case we are even asked to play along, using a flashlight to blink different patterns of pulses at a black disk, where we see varying responses resembling those of female fireflies answering the male’s codelike summonses.


Not all simulations are inspired, and there are times when we might be tempted to dismiss a display of hovering jellyfish as just so much plastic, but then we would miss the point of the gallery: that the Aequorea victoria, a jellyfish on the West Coast, produces two kinds of light. One is blue, the result of a bioluminescent chemical reaction, but the other is the result of fluorescence, which is what happens when the blue light hits the jellyfish’s rim and is transformed into an emerald green.


A simulation also allows us to get a sense of the astonishing properties of bioluminescent bays, where tiny animals known as dinoflagellates soak up the sun’s energy during the day and produce pinpoints of light in the water all night, swarming and flashing in response to each disturbance. In the exhibition hundreds of diffuse and quivering points of light are projected on the darkened floor; they swirl and flash as a visitor passes over them. The simulation may be weak, but it is not ineffective.


This display shows just how unusual the conditions must be for the phenomenon. The bay must have a narrow opening to the sea, with gentle winds that push waves of dinoflagellates into the bay. Sunlight must be plentiful. And shallow water. And mangrove roots and leaves to provide nutrients. Then all of this must be accompanied by dinoflagellates, which are far older than the dinosaurs, dating back 1.2 billion years.


These plankton can be both floating and fixed (some settle inside corals); some are fragile, with thin cell walls, while others are covered in “rigid plates of armor”; some are poisonous, others simply delightful. The simulation of their effect in a bioluminescent bay is more than sufficiently alluring, as the effects are in almost all the displays, providing a glimpse of a world that we cannot readily sample.


The only creature that most visitors will have extensive personal experience with is the firefly, but here we are inducted into a more intimate knowledge of just how much of the firefly’s glow is another version of the peacock’s tail, good for courtship and identification. Differing patterns of light signify different species of firefly.


This is surely one of the functions of bioluminescence in general: it is a way to present simple information in darkness. But in the case of the firefly, we also see one of its limitations.