oh god where do I start…

planimal? A plant/animal orginism isn’t new. Heard of fungi? Plant cellular structure with animal-type energy production. The reverse of what we see here – animal cellular structure with plant energy production.

“E. chlorotica turn sunlight into energy — something only plants can do” — yeah, only plants and cyanobacteria, green filamentous bacteria, ciliates, flagellates and some proteobacteria (all domains at equal rank to ‘plants’ in modern taxonomy).

“However, the baby slugs can’t carry out photosynthesis until they’ve stolen their own chloroplasts” – oh, OK, so they actually can’t produce energy from light on their own. So they are still genetically an animal. They just gain photosynthetic ability after pinching organelles from other organisms. Like a lot of other organisms do (bacteria are particularly good at this). Even we can’t survive without the microflora living in our GI tract. It’s a kind of symbiosis. This slug’s just taken it a step further and god rid of the cell and just kept what’s inside it. Uncommon for an animal, sure, but hardly bizarre.

“This is the first time that multicellar animals have been able to produce chlorophyll,” True. But that’s about it. Doesn’t make it a plant. How exactly the slugs managed to incorporate plant gene sequences into their own DNA is unknown, but the process isn’t new to science. Bacteria do it as a matter of course using plasmids, which have been hijacked by scientists as a fundamental tool in gene therapy technology. For something like this to happen naturally is astounding, sure, but then again, that’s evolution.