After devoting so many hours to learning how to feed and rear slugs, I suppose I can’t complain about the current situation.

Baby slugs filling 10 gallon tank. 3/21/18

I am drowning in Elysia.

In the past month, we have shipped well over a hundred baby E. clarki (plus a few dozen E. crispata) back to their homeland in Florida, gave another dozen to local aquarists, fixed at least a few hundred for anatomical studies, and yet there seem to be hundreds more.  They are destroying Bryopsis as fast as I can feed it to them, and I had to cull another few hundred last week to keep the rest from starving.  I honestly did not think I had that many babies growing in the system.

I will keep the remaining slugs for the next few weeks, because several groups of students have proposed using them for their independent projects in Neurobiology Lab class.  It will be very exciting to see what the students can accomplish.  We have also been extracting mucus from groups of slugs, for use in feeding assays (soon to be the subject of another post, I hope).  Finally, I am holding onto some of the smallest for another round of staining (yet another upcoming post) and predation assays (yet, yet another upcoming post).

When I resorted to buying E. crispata collected in Haiti last fall, because I was not able to obtain E. clarki from the Keys, I would never have dreamed that there would be such a turnaround. We now have enough slugs of all sizes to do any kind of experiment we can imagine.

Elysia clarki eggs, from 2nd generation parents. Box of Slugs 2.0, 4/1/18.

Not only that, there are no longer any mysterious gaps in the life cycle, from egg to veliger to hatchling to adult to egg.  The offspring from the first brood have become reproductively mature, so we are getting eggs from slugs that grew up here in Maryland.  As a result, I have put together a page about how to culture E. clarki.

Mother and daughter dozing in the early morning. Box of Slugs 2.0, 3/31/18.

There will undoubtedly be challenges ahead, but developing a self-sustaining colony was one of the major goals of the Elysia project.  Now the fun can begin.

Stay tuned for updates on Elysia anatomy, making food with mucus, predation assays, and take a look at the details of how I ended up with several hundred baby slugs.