Aphids may be the only animals which can Photosynthesize
This is pretty amazing.
Animals are not solar powered. Not directly anyway. When you need more energy (animals do all this moving around) you need to find a faster way of getting power. That typically means eating the things which get energy from the sun (plants). When you need even more energy you need to eat the things which eat the things which use the sun: i.e. what humans do (grass uses sun, sheep eat grass, we eat sheep.)
Actually, the sheep are an interesting example. Sheep brains are far smaller than human brains--this should be readily apparent if you have had to deal with them before, they rank somewhere above rocks and somewhere below Jersey Shore cast members in terms of intelligence (a pretty small range mind you). To supply the energy they need for their brain on a daily basis - they need to eat a large plateful of grass, roughly the size of a dinner portion of salad (not too bad in other words). For a human to power his brain on grass you would need to eat about 40lbs of grass per day. In other words - you better have the mouth of a combine harvester and the digestive system of a mulcher.
But now something really cool has come along. There have long been animals (mainly little ones) which eat bacteria etc and then use them/steal their genes so they can get the benefit of being solar powered. But now we have evidence of the first solar-powered (partly) animal. Call it the Chevy Volt of bugs and you'd be just about right.
Animals are not solar powered. Not directly anyway. When you need more energy (animals do all this moving around) you need to find a faster way of getting power. That typically means eating the things which get energy from the sun (plants). When you need even more energy you need to eat the things which eat the things which use the sun: i.e. what humans do (grass uses sun, sheep eat grass, we eat sheep.)
Actually, the sheep are an interesting example. Sheep brains are far smaller than human brains--this should be readily apparent if you have had to deal with them before, they rank somewhere above rocks and somewhere below Jersey Shore cast members in terms of intelligence (a pretty small range mind you). To supply the energy they need for their brain on a daily basis - they need to eat a large plateful of grass, roughly the size of a dinner portion of salad (not too bad in other words). For a human to power his brain on grass you would need to eat about 40lbs of grass per day. In other words - you better have the mouth of a combine harvester and the digestive system of a mulcher.
But now something really cool has come along. There have long been animals (mainly little ones) which eat bacteria etc and then use them/steal their genes so they can get the benefit of being solar powered. But now we have evidence of the first solar-powered (partly) animal. Call it the Chevy Volt of bugs and you'd be just about right.
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| Mmmmm sunlight... OM NOM NOM NOM |
Turns out that some tiny little Aphids love sunlight like Tom Hanks loves volleyballs (WILSON!!!). While they do generally make most of their ATP from eating plants, certain aphids actually have the genes to photosynthesize. Which is pretty amazing.
Here is the nerdy (and really cool) stuff from Nature:
The pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) is already a strange creature. Aphids reproduce by parthenogenesis and can be born pregnant, though males (who sometimes lack mouths) are born in colder weather. They're also the only animal that has been identified that can synthesize carotenoids, the pigments that appear in chloroplasts and chromoplasts that harness solar energy for use by the cells. Does that mean that pea aphids photosynthesize?
That's the question explored in a recent study, "Light-induced electron transfer and ATP synthesis in a carotene synthesizing insect," published this week in Nature. In 2010, Yale entomologist Nancy Moran discovered that aphids possess the gene for synthesizing carotenoids, meaning that the pigment is "home grown" rather than lifted from another photosynthetic species. Carotenoids are metabolically expensive chemicals to synthesize, prompting Alain Robichon, an entomologist at the Sophia Agrobiotech Institute, to wonder what purpose the carotenoids serve.
Robichon studied different colored aphids of the species: green aphids, which contain high levels of carotenoids and are born in colder lab conditions; orange aphids, which are born in optimal lab conditions; and white aphids, which contain little to no carotenoid pigment and are born when resources are limited. Robichon's team found that the green aphids make significantly higher levels of ATP than white aphids do, and that orange aphids make more ATP when placed in sunlight than when placed in darkness. This suggests that the pigments may be part of a system of photo-induced electron transfer that enables aphids to synthesize energy from sunlight.
Although study co-author Maria Capovilla cautions that further research is needed before we can determine whether aphids can photosynthesize as many non-animal species can, she notes that this ability could function as an emergency backup that helps aphids survive their treks from plant to plant. While feeding aphids already consume more sugar than they need to survive, perhaps a photosynthetic ability enables them to travel to a new host plant. And perhaps aphids are particularly well suited to survive periods of environmental stress, at least if they only last a single generation.
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