( g that sea slugs flatten out their bodi...)The secret lives of sea slugs

At field sites near Vargas Island, British Columbia, and in southern Puget Sound, Wyeth, Willows, and their colleagues used SCUBA and time-lapse videos made with surveillance cameras like those used to catch shoplifters to observe the slugs' secret lives, then described certain behaviors and their relationships to sensory cues.

The goal of neuroethologists who study sea slugs in the laboratory is to link specific behaviors to their underlying neural controls. Information on behaviors and sensory cues that influence them is essential to the study of sensory systems, central processing, and motor systems, the basic neural elements that control behavior in all animals.

The sea slug has become a favored research model in this research arena over the past 40 years. "It's nature's gift to neurobiologists," says Wyeth. "It has a relatively small number of large, color-coded nerve cells that always appear in the same place in a relatively simple nervous system that controls behaviors that are easy to study under conditions of neurophysiological experimentation."

The observations that sea slugs navigate with respect to water flow and direction based on odor and other cues will inspire further studies of this behavior and aid scientists studying the nerve cells involved in navigation, an important problem every animal faces.

"Once you know what a behavior is, you have a starting point to see how the brain is actually controlling it," Wyeth says.