• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Scientists Have Reared These Colorful Sea Slugs From Egg To Adult For First Time

August 12, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The mysteries of the animal world are plentiful with much about the inner workings of the lives of Earth’s animals still to be uncovered. In the sea slug department, however, there has been something of a breakthrough, as scientists have successfully reared a chromodorid sea slug from egg to adult in a lab for the first time.

Advertisement

Nudibranchs, or sea slugs, are mollusks and are popular for their bright colors and funky appearances. Surprisingly, sea slug young have shells immediately after hatching that they lose as they settle on reefs. At this stage of development, they shift from a floating lifestyle to becoming creatures at the bottom of the sea bed. While the stages of development between floating and seafloor life ages are understood in some species they had remained something of a mystery in the species Hypselodoris festiva. 

The reason why it is so difficult to rear sea slugs in the Chromodorididae family, which includes H. festival, is that they are picky eaters, with each species having a very specific diet, some of which are unknown. Therefore getting the appropriate food for the adults to create an egg mass has been challenging. 

Nudibranchs are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning they have both sex organs. Adult individuals spawn masses of fertilized eggs after mating. Scientists collected adult H. festiva from tidal pools in Japan and reared them in a laboratory setting. Just six days later several thousand floating larvae hatched. Fed on a diet of microalgae the young continued to grow, metamorphosing about three weeks after their hatch date. 

Metamorphosis involved the loss of their shells and the known switch of lifestyle from floating to sea floor dwellers. At this time they also ate the same food as adults, namely sponges, and developed their characteristic coloration at around 36 days after hatching. They started to form the feathery sensory structures known as rhinophores as well as gills around 42 days after hatching. 

A series of eight images showing the formation of orange horn like organs on top of the sea slugs head.

The chemosensory organs called rhinophores forming in stages during development.

Image Credit: Hayashi, M & Nakano, H. Scientific Reports (2024) CC BY 4.0

Observing their growth in the lab setting allowed researchers to create nine stages of growth for the sea slugs, which include two metamorphic stages and seven juvenile ones. 

Advertisement

The study also revealed more about sea slug bottoms. Prior to the study, the anus was believed to be on the dorsal side of the sea slug and did not move much during growth. However in H, festiva the anus appeared on the ventral side as a juvenile and the adult stage anus was on the dorsal side, meaning the sea slugs had, for a time, two anuses. The team speculates that the internal organs detach from the juvenile anus and move to the adult position. 

There are more than 395 species in the Chromodorididae family, and the full life cycle of none of them had been fully understood before now. The team is proposing H. festiva as the model organism for chromodorid research and the methods applied to rear this species could be applied to other sea slugs in the future.  

The paper is published in Scientific Reports.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Toshiba says detailed talks on buyouts meaningful only after option review
  2. BlackRock says it is dipping its toes back in to China after rout
  3. Woman In India Seeks Help After Developing Large “Horns” On Her Head
  4. Brand New Species Of Delightful Sea Creature Discovered Off The British Coast

Source Link: Scientists Have Reared These Colorful Sea Slugs From Egg To Adult For First Time

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version