Blog, Jvstin Style

Photosynthetic Sea Slug

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/green-sea-slug/

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.

The findings have to be replicated, of course. It could be a mistake and the slugs are getting the chlorophyll from algae rather than manufacturing it completely by themselves. Still, it shows that Nature is far more strange than we imagined...