(photo: Jeff Goddard)
This is Elysia hedgpethi, or Hedgpeth's Sapsucker. It lives on Codium fragile or Dead Man's Fingers (an apt descriptive name!). It is actually a tiny kind of sea slug much like a sea hare. Unlike the mostly carnivorous nudibranchs, this creature pierces the algae's cells and sucks out the fluids, thus the "sapsucker" part of the name. It's claim to fame is that it is able to keep the chlorophyll, enclosed in packets called plastids, and by keeping them retained intracellularly in their tissues utilize the nutritional value of them for approx. 10 days, for this species of Elysia. This is unusual, especially in an animal, and is termed kleptoplasty. This varies by species. There is one related sea hare, Elysia Chlorotica, that can utilize eaten choloroplasts for all it's energy needs for the approximately 10 months it lives. This is the closest we come to a photosynthetic animal, or one that gets it's energy only from the sun. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3008634/
my hedgpethi, barely 1/4 inch long.
a clump of dead man's fingers algae.
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