Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant | Hacker News Reader

Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant

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61 pointsiamwil16 comments

What's unclear in the submitted article is whether the slugs have genes evolved by mutation for producing chlorophyll from earlier slug genes or whether the slugs have incorporated algal genes into their own genome--which would be be a bigger deal. Of course the article notes that some scientists don't think that the chlorophyll production is being done by slug genes at all, but by algal genes contaminating the slugs. Interesting research, well worth more follow-up.

How many human beings would like to be able to photosynthesize?

I enjoy eating too much. However it would be an awesome way to fix starvation during droughts when the sun is shining brightly.

You still need water for photosynthesis.

But apparently salt water is fine. No shortage of that.

Photosynthesis will not give us the ability to ingest huge amounts of salt without consequence. ;)

Huh, so that's why my plants keep dying.

It wouldn't work for warm blooded creatures - we use too much energy to be supplied by the sun on our skin.

I could read more if I didn't have to eat!

People like to be green, but I'm not sure they want to literally be green in colour ..

I kinda wondered about that. If people could photosynthesize, why would we ever move around? The only thing I can think of is to migrate to where it's sunnier, and only eat in the winter.

On another note, for a startup, a lot of the cost is in food and rent. If you can get rid of the food part by sitting by the sun, I guess that'd be another advantage for startups in CA.

Well if you're going to go that route...

... then wouldn't it be cool to be snails? It's still kind of like a slug, plus you solve the rent part by carrying your entire house on your back. Not sure if there are any advantages to being a snail in sunny CA though.

Check back in a couple million years, and maybe it will have evolved chloroplast production. But this seems unlikely to happen, given how advantageous it would be and how much time it's had to evolve without it happening yet.

How advantageous something would be when "fully evolved" shouldn't affect the chances of evolution, I think. The advantages of the incremental steps are the important.

I don't think he was implying otherwise.

No, no. I'm just saying that given the amount of time that sea slugs have been around, the usefulness of photosynthesizing without needing to eat algae, and the fact that it hasn't evolved yet, it's probably really hard to evolve.

Chloroplasts are not produced by the cells. They have their own DNA and they replicate independently.

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