Looking like open pea pods with a bright luster, sea snails Elyse cf. border and Elysia atroviridis they are not your usual gastropods. First, they are members of the sacoglossa, a snail clade known for taking algae from marine plants and integrating chloroplasts from those algae in their own cells, allowing them to obtain energy from sunlight. These two species of snails are also capable of extreme regeneration; They can cut off your head and grow whole new bodies.
New research published today in Current Biology describes this incredible feat of autotomy or self-amputation. (It is worth mentioning that bodies do not generate new heads.) The discovery was made in Yoichi Yusa’s lab at Nara Women’s University in Japan, which sea snails from eggs to adulthood over generations to better understand these viscous creatures.
Sayaka Mitoh, a university biologist and lead author of the recent paper, came across the well-intentioned dismemberment of snails when he came across a person in the laboratory whose head was no longer connected to his pickled refrigerator body. . But his head was still moving.
“I didn’t think they would perform such an unusual autotomy,” Mitoh said in an email. “This discovery was completely a serendipity.”
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Once the team found a self-employed individual, they struggled to investigate why and exactly how that rupture occurred. These observations included attempts to induce self-decapitation, mimicking the kind of short tips a marine predator would make on a snail in the wild (they probably guessed, the servant separated from his body was similar to a fighter pilot who used an ejector seat).
Researchers he tied a nylon cord around the place where the snail’s head met its body, where it seemed that the snail was prone to make the body-cranial separation. They did this quite easily, more like a tie that was too tight than an asphyxiating agent – but snails do not have respiratory systems like vertebrates, so there is no sea..
Although the true nature of the autotomy remains unknown, the team managed to induce autonomy in all but one slug. one day. In the newspaper, Mitoh’s team suggested that autotomy in the wild could take place in Elysia atroviridis because the slug is regularly burdened with planktonic parasites – maybe leaving behind a body full of parasites to grow a new one is the easiest way to deal with the infestation. The researchers found that snails could be left without their heart for days (located in body, just below the breaking plane) and, along a couple weeks, the new bodies were almost at full size. In the newspaper, the team claimed that the snails could pass without their bodies, simply surviving on them. photosynthetic capabilities.
“While we live a few days without a heart, it may seem impossible from our human perspective, these animals actually breathe through their skin and they completely lack their gills,” he said. Elise Laetz, an expert in sea snail photosynthesis at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who is not affiliated with the new study. “It doesn’t surprise me that they can last a heartless week to pump oxygenated hemolymph (such as invertebrate blood) around their bodies as they regenerate a new one.”
Laetz said in an email that it seemed the idea of photosynthesis-as-ration less likely, as a lot of mechanisms for kleptoplasty (that unique ability to taking algal chloroplasts and using to capitalize on them solar energy) are located in the body, not in the head.
“Chloroplasts are stored in the digestive gland of the snail, which is highly branched and is found mainly in the body of most sacoglossan species. When the slug automates its body, it throws away most of its chloroplasts and therefore most of the energy it could get from those chloroplasts, ”said Laetz. “I think the slug is more likely to fuel regeneration by feeding directly after it automates its body, as the authors noted.”
Much more research needs to be done to better understand how these small crushing snails come into existence without the help (or hindrance) of most of their body shape. TThe new comments suggest that there are many more questions ask from themand animal.
“We want to study whether other species of sacoglossans have this ability to study the evolutionary model and process of such autotomy and extreme regeneration,” Mitoh said. “The function of autotomy is also worth studying. Moreover, we will further explore the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon at the tissue and cellular level. ”
Maybe not have charisma of A “corgi ” giraffe or Crazy platypus DNA, but photosynthesis, self-decapitation the sea snails in the sacoglossa deserve just as much attention. Headless bodies will continue to be probed, and headless bodies even more so.
“Observations such as those presented in this paper highlight the need for fundamental scientific research in all branches of the tree of life,” said Laetz. “You never know when an animal as harmless as a sea snail has an ability that could lead to advances in applied research.”