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Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant
- TheSOB88 17y agoCheck 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.
- netcan 17y agoHow 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.
- pwmanagerdied 17y agoI don't think he was implying otherwise.
- TheSOB88 17y agoNo, 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.
- gus_massa 17y agoChloroplasts are not produced by the cells. They have their own DNA and they replicate independently.
- tokenadult 17y agoWhat'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?
- bokchoi 17y agoI enjoy eating too much. However it would be an awesome way to fix starvation during droughts when the sun is shining brightly.
- Technophilis 17y agoYou still need water for photosynthesis.
- sailormoon 17y agoBut apparently salt water is fine. No shortage of that.
- coderdude 17y agoPhotosynthesis will not give us the ability to ingest huge amounts of salt without consequence. ;)
- bokchoi 17y agoHuh, so that's why my plants keep dying.
- ars 17y agoIt wouldn't work for warm blooded creatures - we use too much energy to be supplied by the sun on our skin.
- DTrejo 17y agoI could read more if I didn't have to eat!
- sailormoon 17y agoPeople like to be green, but I'm not sure they want to literally be green in colour ..
- iamwil 17y agoI 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.
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