The brilliant emerald green sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, spends months living on sunlight just like plants. It’s been called the photosynthesizing sea slug in the past, but how it manages to do this as well as it does is a complete mystery. In a new study appearing in the Biological Bulletin, researchers reveal that the sea slug has incorporated genes from the algae that it eats.
"There is no way on earth that genes from an alga should work inside an animal cell," says Sidney Pierce from the University of South Florida. "And yet here, they do. They allow the animal to rely on sunshine for its nutrition. So if something happens to their food source, they have a way of not starving to death until they find more algae to eat."
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