In the depths of the sea, all sorts of toothy creatures usually hide and the deeper, the more terrible they are. Therefore, today we will not go there, but will stay closer to the sun, where the wonderful beast Costasiella kuroshimae lives. Let’s call it for simplicity sea lamb, fortunately, it is very similar to a fabulous underwater lamb!
Nice, isn’t it? And very, very harmless!
It is not easy to find a sea leaf lamb, although it lives in a vast territory, it is only 5 mm in length.
See those green horns all over the back? There is real magic going on in them!
Biologists say that the sea lamb is such a slug. But they are countered by chemists who call it a living laboratory. Just imagine, a sea lamb gnaws green algae not for the sake of satiety, but in order to gently extract chloroplasts from them. They are needed for the process of photosynthesis by which plants “feed” on sunlight. The phenomenon is very complex and the sea sheep itself is not capable of, therefore, it takes other people’s chloroplasts and builds them into its cells. How exactly, scientists are still figuring out, but the result is a small miracle. The slug begins to absorb sunlight as food – and so it lives.
It looks like a beast, but eats like a plant!
There are literally a few creatures that do not belong to plants and microorganisms, but also know how to use photosynthesis on the entire planet. This is the most real miracle of nature!