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====== About the slug ====== The //Ariolimax Dolicophallus// is a relatively unstudied species. Here we aim to provide concise and accurate biological information about the //Ariolimax Dolicophallus//. ===== Slug biology ===== === Predators === === Eating habits === === Mating habits === ===== Heterozygosity and slug selfing ===== Every animal has a genome, and almost every genome is stored in multiple copies. Some plants keep as many as 100 different copies of their genome (with small changes between each) but many animals are diploid, meaning they have two copies of their genome. Heterozygosity is a term that describes the difference between the two copies of the genome. Most diploid organisms are heterozygous since they get one copy of their genome from each parents. While the ploidy of the banana slug is unknown, we suspect that it is diploid. At the end of the spring 2015 class professor [[https://www.soe.ucsc.edu/people/ed | Ed Green ]] performed a heterozygosity analysis on the kolossus Discovar //de novo// banana slug assembly. The result showed that the slug that was sequenced was entirely homozygous. This is very strange, normally organisms are heterozygous because they get a copy of their genome from each parent. While the level of heterozygosity changes between organisms, it is very odd to see an organism that has no heterozygosity at all. The lack of variation in the slug can be explained by one of their odder behaviors, 'selfing'. It has been proven that the banana slug can 'self', a process in which the organism impregnates itself. By repeating this process over many generations, a homozygous slug would be born. Our findings suggest that the slugs do indeed self in nature, and it may be their preferred way of reproducing. Our project sequenced a wild caught slug, and the fact that this wild caught slug was homozygous heavily implies that it is the result of several generations of selfing.
