Monsters Ate My DNA
Sufferin' Succotash, a Solar Sea Slug
This creature is a wonder of the natural world for reasons other than just its ethereal beauty. It has a trait that makes it unique among animals.
It’s solar powered.
Sea slug elysia chlorotica needs to eat only at the beginning of its life. Out of a diet of algae it absorbs chloroplasts, the plant cell organelles that carry out photosynthesis. From then on, these provide all its energy needs by converting sunlight. The Toyota Prius has nothing on this.
But that isn’t even the weird part. What’s really puzzling is that though chloroplasts are, like mitochondria, genetically independent from their host cells, they do not themselves contain all the information necessary for the photosynthetic process. Other plant proteins must be made too. So how does an exotic green sea slug learn to do that?
Researchers have to come suspect that it pulls the necessary DNA out of the genome of the algae, and integrates it into its own genetic code.
Though genetic information passing from one organism to another is far from unknown – viruses do it all the time of course – this would be the first known case of one taking useful code from another to “patch” its own. The possibilities this opens up for science and our understanding of evolution are fascinating.
Like, what would happen if instead of algae ya fed ‘em on people?
