Great name for an unusual little critter. I've only seen these a few times over the years. I posted one back in May or so of last year I saw in Maui, but these are slightly better pictures.
I found this one on a shore dive Pat and I did with friends off Kukio up north earlier this year. Interestingly enough, we went over a sandy area that sort of reminded me of areas I've seen them before and I thought "this might be a likely spot to find one". After a few minutes of looking I gave up and went over the reef (where I've never seen one) and four or five minutes later ran across this guy.
Later,
Steve
2 comments:
interestingly, this is one of the few (perhaps only?) animal that uses photosynthesis to generate energy!
The term "sap-sucking" comes from the fact that it sucks the chlorophyll from the algae / plants underwater, stores it in its body, then filters CO2 (using sunlight) to produce sugars.
That's cool. I didn't realize they were one of the photosynthetic slugs. There's actually a bunch of them, I heard about them first years ago back when I kept aquariums. Here's a link http://www.seaslugforum.net/showall.cfm?base=solarpow
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