Re: Update on Elysia crispata feeding

May 4, 2005
From: Skip Pierce

Note added 30 May 2006: This is also refers to Elysia clarki, a new species which was previously considered a colour form of E. crispata

Hi,
In answer to the recent messages [#13687;  #13696]:
We have just sent a manuscript off which describes a new species of Elysia from the Florida Keys - formerly called Elysia crispata - distinct form Elysia crispata in the Caribbean. Given my usual area of research is cell biology, I must say that we wrote the paper with considerable trepidation. I do not want to pre-empt the journal nor put anything into the public domain that we can not get published in a reviewed journal, so I'll not tell the details here (Kathe, you'll likely get it to review - or at least if I was editor, that's what I'd do) --- but in any case, we found no molecular evidence or microscopic evidence that either the Keys slugs, nor E. crispata from the Virgin Islands eat any species of Caulerpa - either as juveniles or adults. Possibly they eat it and do not sequester the plastids from it-it turns out that they can squester plastids from several algae which we've identified in the mansucript. One last comment about living in the dark - is that if you have enough stored energy you can starve a long time. I do not disagree with comment that E. crispata may be eating bacterial films-someone could easily test that with antibiotics, by the way-but if you look at E. crispata with the electron microscope, you'll see that they have massive amounts of intracellular lipids, presumably produced from symbiotic plastid activity, that will provide a considerable energy sink. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the length of starvation had to do with the depletion of that reserve. Anyway, we're about to send off a couple of more papers on feeding of both juvenile and adult E. crispata as well as the Keys species (if the taxomonic paper gets accepted), so we can say a bit more about the proof of what they eat and what they don't, then.

Skip

pierce@cas.usf.edu

Pierce, S.K., 2005 (May 4) Re: Update on Elysia crispata feeding. [Message in] Sea Slug Forum. Australian Museum, Sydney. Available from http://www.seaslugforum.net/find/13702

Factsheet

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