Costasiella kuroshimae – Solar Powered animals, that do indirect photosynthesis

I just got to see a different species of kleptoplastic sea slugs in the wild last month, on a kayak tour of the mangroves around Key West. Our guide scooped some lettuce sea slugs up in a plastic container (and then returned them safely). They were bigger, about 3 inches long, with a wavy/frilly green border. It made my biologist heart very happy!

This is exactly why pokemon devs are looking for biologists! (seriously) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00960-8

I remember as a kid wondering if we could give humans chlorolaplasts.

We‘re all solar—powered animals.

Real Life Bulbasaur

Life is amazing.

Makes you imagine a world with high solar power density and maybe lower gravity or something where larger land animals might be realistically supplemented by solar energy as well.

This is one of those times evolution doesn't make sense to me. It's clear how a giraffe's neck evolves, the ones that could reach higher leaves in trees had an advantage. In examples like this, how does this evolve when there is no gradual change? An animal had to exist that had an offspring that somehow both absorbed the chloroplasts of the food it ate in a way that it could use (not just simple digestion), then have a place to store them, then have a mechanism to move the chloroplasts to the storage space, then have the mechanisms in their body to use the energy the stored chloroplasts create. How does that happen gradually when each step is totally useless without the others?

(please note I am not challenging the scientific truth of evolution, I simply do not understand how something like this happens)

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