Elysia chlorotica steals the ability to turn light into food from algae (Image: Mary Tyler/Mary Rumpho)
Gallery: Sunshine-eating animals in pictures
From sea slugs to salamanders, many animals can naturally tap into solar power – and we’re learning how to make more
IT WAS a long shot,” says . “We just wondered what would happen.” She has done an extraordinary experiment: injecting photosynthetic bacteria into the eggs of zebrafish.
Agapakis, a research student at Harvard Medical School in Boston, only wanted to see if the bacteria could survive. Bacteria that get into larger cells usually kill or are killed, but occasionally things work out differently, with consequences that can transform the planet. The ability to turn light into food evolved in cyanobacteria, and plants evolved when more sophisticated cells stole the technology by enslaving cyanobacteria within themselves.
While most biologists would have bet that cyanobacteria and fish do not mix, the Synechococcus that Agapakis injected into the eggs were still alive two weeks after the fish hatched, which is the point when the pigment of zebrafish develops. The bacteria might survive longer in a .
However, the cyanobacteria did not grow and divide as normal. They also didn’t provide much sugar to the fish, says Agapakis, so the fish embryos got little if any energy from light. This was true even for cyanobacteria genetically modified to export sugar. Yet the mere fact that both fish and cyanobacteria survived raises tantalising questions. Could we one day create fish that get part of their energy from sunlight? Could photosynthetic animals help feed the world?
This might sound laughable, but…
