Salty Slug Love

Slippery, slimy, oozy slugs; what’s not to love? Slugs can be small and slugs can be as long as your arm! Slugs can be sausage shaped and brown, or they can have leaves, legs, and lots of rainbow colours! They can live anywhere wet, and lots live under the sea. 

Salty Samples 

Sea slugs are a family of boneless animals that contain a particularly fancy looking molluscs called nudibranchs. Usually they’re small enough to fit on your hand, but they can be as long as a sheet of binder paper. Their shapes and colours result in names like “dragon” and “orange peel,” or “sea bunny,” “dancer” and “clown.” Start an image search and you could browse pictures of fanciful nudibranchs all day. There are more than 3000 kinds! 

Pantry Paint Packs 

Like flamingoes get their pink colour from their food, nudibranchs get their colour from their diet too. Check out this little creature that looks like a sheep that rolled in cut grass! It’s the leafy sheeps’ algae diet that makes them green. They store the chloroplasts from their food and that means photosynthesis happens inside their bodies like it does in plants. 

Nudibranch Brunch 

Nudibranchs are carnivorous! They eat algae, sponges, and even other sea slugs. Some also eat coral and even stinging jellyfish, and that makes them a bit toxic. Like the leafy sheep keeps some chloroplasts from its food, the jellyfish eating “blue dragon” keeps some of the stinging cells from its food. Like a lot of colourful things in nature, the bright hues warn us that they can hurt. Touching them can sting. 

Making Nudibranchs 

Any two nudibranchs can make babies together, because they all have both sex organs. They’re hermaphrodites, just like earthworms and most snails are. About 5 of every 100 animal species are hermaphroditic.

A gooey ribbon of fertilized eggs will hatch into nudibranchs that look just like their parents but smaller. Depending on the type, there can be 2 eggs or 25 million! Once they leave the nest, they’ll live just a few weeks to a year. 

Notice Nudibranchs 

To see a nudibranch in person, you’ll have to go out into the ocean because they don’t survive captivity for long. But you’ll find some of these saltwater slugs along every ocean coast — except in the Arctic and Antarctic circles. They love coral reefs. You will find nudibranchs in shallow water and way down in the deep. Look on the bottom, and remember they’re usually very small. Most photos of these creatures are taken with a close-up macro lens.

The Ghost Plant: Monotropa uniflora

Jan Thornhill

Any day now—if it ever rains here in Ontario—a most peculiar character will start poking out of the ground in the forest beside my house. The Ghost Plant or Indian Pipes, known as Monotropa uniflora to the scientific community, confuses people every year. No part of it is green, which means it has no chlorophyll, so obviously it's not a plant, right? 

Wrong.

Monotropa uniflora flower close up. (Walter Siegmund)

Monotropa uniflora is, indeed a plant, but it has evolved into an entity that no longer needs chlorophyll to produce energy for itself. Instead, it steals energy from other plants—specifically from trees. It does this in a tricky, roundabout way by joining its roots with the mycelia of mushrooms that, in turn, are networking symbiotically with the roots of nearby trees. The Ghost Plant is a parasite. The mushrooms involved, are not.

This Russula could unwittingly be aiding a parasitic Ghost Plant.

Many species of forest fungi have symbiotic relationships with trees. Their mycelia—networks of root-like threads—intertwine with a tree's roots, helping the tree obtain water and essential minerals from the soil. In return, the fungus receives the energy it needs to grow in the form of sugars from the trees. Both parties benefit. 

The Ghost Plant, which can't provide food for itself through photosynthesis the way chlorophyll-producing plants can, sneakily takes advantage of the relationship between a mushroom (usually a Russula species) and a tree by tricking the mushroom into forming a mycorrhizal relationship with its own roots. In this way, the Ghost Plant receives photosynthetic energy without doing anything at all. It's a total freeloader. The mushroom gets nothing in return, nor does the tree, but no one is harmed in the process, so feel free to enjoy this spooky looking oddity next time you come across one in the woods.

A pink Ghost Plant grows in western North America. (Stephanie Searle)

References:

The Ghost Plant as Tom Volk's "Fungus" of the Month

Mycorrhizas on Tree of Life