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Anonymous 12/1/2010(Tue)10:03:49 No.455492

So, apparently, there is a species of sea slug that can produce chlorophyll (and absorb it from food). I wonder if this could be applied to humans? If not that, perhaps we could at least have grown animal farms?

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/53496/description/Sea_slug_steals_genes_for_greens,_makes_chlorophyll_like_a_plant

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Anonymous 13/1/2010(Wed)05:55:11 No.456352

Amazing! At first I thought it was using it just for camouflage but it really does photosynthesis!

Anonymous 13/1/2010(Wed)10:02:29 No.456675

Pretty interesting. Nice find.

Anonymous 13/1/2010(Wed)10:34:19 No.456728

>>455492
We probably could, but it would be terribly ineffective with current animals.
If we started eating insects, it could actually do some good and not just be a gimmick.
If we started eating insects, we would have far more meat for far lesser costs though, so we wouldn't need it.

And no, humans with chlorophyll would be green humans with negligibly improved metabolism. We are talking about 20 kcal a day here.
It wouldn't be enough to cover the most basic needs, even if you sunbathed all day and did nothing else. That's why animals have no chlorophyll. Also, thermoregulation is ineffective as fuck. Sea slugs don't do it, so they may even get a slight boost from photosynthesis with their flat bodies. No mammal could gain any reasonable energy with it, though.

Anonymous 13/1/2010(Wed)10:51:20 No.456744

>>456728
OK, corrections time.
I said all this crap before reading the article, so I underestimated the energy one can get from photosynthesis. The slug guy gets enough to survive without eating anything.
Humans would still not get enough. Sugar cane gets less than 1 W per square meter and it happens to be one of the most efficient plants.
Human brain alone works at 20 W. You'd need a shitton of adaptations for photosynthesis to be worth it.
Hey, my random estimate of 20 kcal was surprisingly accurate. Assuming body surface of 1 square meter (human body has around 1.6-1.8, but not much of it is exposed to sun) and high efficiency (1 W per 1 m^2 - sugar cane has 0.86 W per 1 m^2) it would be ~20.7 kcal per day.
20 kcal is about 1/5 of a cup of skim milk. Not much energy...

Anonymous 15/1/2010(Fri)07:05:19 No.458832

>>456744
Cold blooded animals can be very economic in energy use but usually animals who can locomote on their own can't take energy only from light. They need to eat too (like many sponges and cnidarians). If this slug really can survive only with sunlight this is amazing!

Just the fact that an animal could steal genes from a creature from another kingdom already is amazing!

Anonymous 17/1/2010(Sun)12:00:02 No.460637

>>458832
>steal genes
It's not stealing actually.
It either accidentally evolved this crap, or got somehow injected with it (mutated virus infection?).
It can survive on it because it's flat, slow and doesn't do much bodily functions. It is not much more than a plant it imitates.

Anonymous 17/1/2010(Sun)03:08:41 No.461165

>>460637

because it's flat, slow and doesn't do much bodily functions

So a lot of people could benefit like this slug because they're just like it.

Anonymous 18/1/2010(Mon)07:01:07 No.462444

>>460637
The article says that the sea slug stole the algae genes.
>Sea slug steals genes

I don't think virus could carry algae genes to an animal, virus are specialized parasites, they only attack one kind of cell.

Evolved to produce chlorophyll? Maybe, Chlorophyll is structurally similar to and produced through the same metabolic pathway as other porphyrin pigments such as heme that we all produce.
The point is that I don't know how much of the chlorophyl is produced in chloroplasts and how much is produced in the rest of the cell. The article makes us believe that the sea slug produced a identical chlorophyl to the one produced by the algae and not just produced his own original chlorophyl. There are many variations of chlorophyl, I doubt that it would produce the exact one produced in the algae by independent evolution. Or it somehow got the algae genes or it is using live algae cells to produce it. It's known that sea slugs can steal cnidoblasts from anemones so maybe they could do something similar to algae.

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