Re: Elysia from Florida

January 13, 2002
From: Kathe R. Jensen

Dear Bill and Kathleen,
I am almost certain that Kathleen's animal is Elysia papillosa. The brownish band on the rhinophores is very distinctive for this species. As far as I remember we did not collect E. patina from Penicillus when I was in Florida, and the only other species feeding on Penicillus is a distinctly striped one, which may be either an undescribed species or a variety of E. subornata (indicated by electrophoresis done by one of Kerry Clarks's Ph.D. students, but never published).

Elysia papillosa has lecithotrophic development, i.e. veligers that do not swim very far and do not need to feed before metamorphosis. Probably your Penicillus had an eggmass, which hatched when it arrived in your lab. Most sacoglossans are about 0.7mm when they settle, and given a good food supply they could grow to about 10mm in a few weeks. You could also have had the juveniles already in the algae when you received them, but if they had been feeding, the alga would probably have shown some damage within the first couple of days. Algal filaments are weakened by the piercings of the cell wall, so even if juvenile sacoglossans do not extract a visible amount of cytoplasm, they still make structural damage to the cell wall.

Cheers,
Kathe

jensen@ait.ac.th

Jensen, K. R., 2002 (Jan 13) Re: Elysia from Florida. [Message in] Sea Slug Forum. Australian Museum, Sydney. Available from http://www.seaslugforum.net/find/5967

Factsheet

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