Part Animal, Part Plant

[Bonsay]

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. “This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C. Microbes swap genes readily, but Zardus said he couldn’t think of another natural example of genes flowing between multicellular kingdoms. Link: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/green-sea-slug/#ixzz0cLDcQTSi Unless this is an elaborate joke, this must be the awesomest thing I've seen all day! If you read further, they say it even has plant genes in its own genome and doesn't just farm the chloroplasts. How cool is that?! I want one... We should totally make green people in the future after we figure it all out.