A haiku tribute to sea slugs and their discoverers

Professor Robin Gill is one of the great unsung heroes who have truly enriched the human existence. He cannot be compared with say Fred Sanger (the scientist who is without doubt the greatest living Briton - and the only living double Nobel laureate). That is like comparing a pineapple with a mango (both wonderful in their own way) but his mangnum opus Rise Ye Sea Slugs touches the heart and soul of anyone who owns a copy (or who has borrowed a copy or has just seen it on a bookshelf or on a coffee table)

Rise ye sea slugs is a collection of 1,000 haiku on the subject of the sea cucumber

It is in tribute to this great work and of course to Jeff Goddard that I give you this haiku

In tiny ocean

Sea slug lives peacefully

Brings joy to Goddard


Bah! my haiku are worse than my poems and not in a McGonagall or MacIntyre "so bad they're brilliant way"

Ah well, back to dirty limericks for me....

Sea Slug Scientific Serendipity (I do love the smell of alliteration in the morning

A nudibranch if not the species in question

I remember someone defining serendipity as looking for a needle in a haystack but finding the farmer’s daughter. This definition will hold for many but for a naturalist perhaps serendipity is finding a new species in your back yard (so to speak)

According to Science Daily this is what happened to Jeff Goddard, project scientist with the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara.

Goddard was working in the tide pools at Carpinteria Reef, in Carpinteria State Park, Calif., when he found a new species of nudibranch. Recognizing it as new, Goddard carefully documented the living specimen before preserving it and sending it off to Terrence M. Gosliner, an authority on the taxonomy of sea slugs at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco

Gosliner named the new sea slug after Goddard when he described it -- and one other newly discovered species of California nudibranch -- in the Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences.


Not much of a story if you are not interested in sea molluscs of the gastropode sort but I would be as pleased as Punch (but only half as handsome, sadly!)

It does provide an excuse for my next post too

A Sea Slug Haiku

following on from my previous post and inspired by Robin D Gill whose book Rise Ye Sea Slugs which contains 900 glorious haikus on the subject, I feel compelled to provide my own haiku in honour of the nudibranch:

Oh mighty Sea Slug
wily thief of chloroplasts
makes food from sunlight

Hmm I think I'll stick to photographs!

Actually Rise ye Sea Slugs actually contains haikus on the subject of sea cucumbers but what the hey!

Nudibranchs... Now with added chlorophyll!

Live Science reports on the discovery of a sea slug that is in one sense part animal and part plant. It produces chlorophyll and so it is the only animal that can carry out photosynthesis.

"They can make their energy-containing molecules without having to eat anything," said Sidney Pierce, a biologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Pierce has been studying Elysia chlorotica, for about 20 years. He presented his most recent findings Jan. 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle. The finding was first reported by Science News.

The sea slugs live in salt marshes in New England and Canada and are believed to have appropriated the genes needed to make the green pigment chlorophyll. This on its own is not enough for photosynthesis: the slugs cannot produce chloroplast, the organelle where photosynthesis takes place.. These are obtained by eating algae.

As long as they receive sufficient light they can survive without food. Furthermore the trait is passed on to offspring

The biggest mystery now is the mechanism by which the chlorophyll-generating genes are actually incorporated into the sea slug’s genome

This is fascinating stuff, with major implications if the mechanism for incorporating genes can be determined. I never ever thought that such a complex creature would be part plant so to speak (nut only so to speak). That said I have met a few people who are so thick they probably need watering!