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Guest lecture by John Pearse and Janet Leonard, from Long Marine Laboratory, University of California-Santa Cruz. They did research on Banana Slugs for several years and talked about their findings in the class.
John talked about habitat, color, general characteristics, predators, and taxonomy of hermaphrodites. Janet talked mostly about sexual behavior of slugs.
Jeffrey Long has slides from Janet Leonard and he will be uploading them.
Additional notes from Jonathan follow.
John originally worked with sea urchins and sea stars primarily.
Janet joined the lab about twelve years ago to study marine slugs.
She was interested in hermaphrodite mating behavior. Banana slugs'
rare behavior of apophallation became a research focus. No one had
really studied banana slugs [academically] since the forties. Alice
Bryant Harper (Aptos naturalist, works with Santa Cruz Museum of
Natural History) wrote The Banana Slug (1988), the best book on
them.
Despite Chancellor Sinsheimer's desire to keep the sea lion as the UCSC mascot, students voted 95% for the banana slug.
There are just two complete mollusc genomes, [California sea hare and giant owl limpet], and neither are very complete.
Banana slugs habitat is very diverse. Though often found in conifer
forests and considered an animal of the Northwest (first found in
Washington or Oregon), they've been found in drier habitats: San
Diego, Napa's McLaughlin Reserve (by small springs), abandoned rice
patties in the Sacramento River Delta, oceanside iceplants in Pacific
Grove. High variation in the numbers you'll see on any day/site: none
or dozens.
They eat feces, hemlock, poison oak, mushrooms (reported but
John has not seen), sorrel, ferns, ice plants, humus soil. In the lab
they eat hamburger, cat food, apples, beans, zucchini, mushrooms,
yams, lettuce and milk.
Colors may camouflage them, e.g. dead leaves often turn bright
yellow, the color of species in Santa Cruz and the SF Bay area. In
other areas you'll find spotted slugs – but they may be a different
species.
There predators may include [seemed uncertain] garter snakes,
salamanders and newts, birds and some small mammals. It is possible
that some specific carnivorous snails and slugs eat banana slugs.
Aphallarion buttoni originally thought to be a different species
because no penes were found when dissected (late 19th century).
However, a Stanford professor later found some with penes and so sent
students into the field to study. They observed apophallation. That
was the end of buttoni as a separate taxon. It became Ariolimax
columbianus.
All banana slugs have an opening on the right side of the “head” for
defecation, breathing, and copulation. The only way to distinguish
species is by dissection of the genitalia. [See slide *Ariolimax
Arilimax columbians genitalia* for overview of genitalia.] The
gonad has a mix of testes and ovaries, and they can play both roles at
same time curing copulation. How is sperm kept separate during
copulation? It is not necessarily. They can fertilize themselves.
And aphalon are born without a penis [sometimes?].
Ariolimax Meadarion californicus is found in San Mateo county.
Santa Cruz has dolichophallus. [See slide comparing their
genitalia.] Mead thoought dolichophallus and californicus
were sufficiently different to be a separate species.
A collaborator in Belgium has been sequencing banana slug
mitochrondrial DNA. They see at least five clades but cannot yet
connect them. ~“Morphologically distinct and molecularly distinct are
not the same thing.” [See slide.]
Interestingly the distribution of the salamander genus Ensatia is
similar to that of banana slug [dolichophallus? – see slide]. Is
this a remnant of five million years ago when there were islands in
the Monterey Bay? Morphologically distinct but molecularly
[mito. DNA] indistict suggests recent change.