Re: Elysia feeding

March 1, 2004
From: Skip Pierce

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

Here's a few more comments with respect to Kathe's reply [#12319]. Elysia crispata is quite interesting in regard to feeding and may be fairly unique among the elysiids because of its lack of food specificity (thanks for that reference by the way). As I said before, we were completely unable to raise the juveniles on any species of Caulerpa, including C. verticellata. The adults did not eat Caulerpa either. I can't explain the different result reported by Kathe. From out experiments, I sort of suspect that the juveniles might eat bacterial or maybe algal films because they survive for a least a couple of weeks without any macroalgae-but will ultimately die unless Bryopsis (or Derbesia) is available. E. crispata will make it to adulthood on Bryopsis alone, my technician has grown some from eggs up to 1.5 inches long (she has much more patience than I) - but we do not yet know anything about chloroplast longevity in that case-and in the field (at least in the Florida Keys) they clearly switch to Penicillus and Halimeda at some point. Our molecular markers found symbiotic plastids from those algae and not from Bryopsis (probably we should look for tiny E. crispata in the field and see whose plastids they have) - or anything else. E. crispata can maintain the plastids for about 3 months, so presumably in the animals we field collected, the Bryopsis plastids taken up (if in fact they do) as juveniles have worn out and been replaced by the Penicillus and Halimeda organelles. But, without one of those species of algae around, E. crispata will eventually turn brown and die. All of this caught us sort of by surprise, because of the years I've spent working on E. chlorotica. That species has an extensive planktonic period (3 weeks-compared to E. crispata where the veliger stage is mostly passed before hatching - maybe 24 hrs post hatch to metamophosis) and, at least in the lab, absolutely will not metamorphose without Vaucheria (again unlike E. crispata which happily metamorphoses without any algae present). E. chlorotica keeps it's plastids throughout the entire life cycle (9 months or so) - and as far as we know - has a complete specificity for Vaucheria. We do not know how long E. crispata lives (maybe someone knows??), but I'd bet 2 years as long as there is the correct algae around - if the correct algae is not around, E. crispata will die, but E chlorotica will live to the usual end of it's life cycle without algae (after an initial feeding), because it takes better care of its plastids. So that's our story -papers will be out soon - it demonstrates, among other things the difficulties of working on natural populations of species with interesting biology (the chloroplast symbiosis, in this case), but with little information available about the natural history.
Skip Pierce

pierce@cas.usf.edu

Pierce, S.K., 2004 (Mar 1) Re: Elysia feeding. [Message in] Sea Slug Forum. Australian Museum, Sydney. Available from http://www.seaslugforum.net/find/12332

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