Weird Beasts – Shoggoth Alert: Half-Vegetable Sea Slugs by Chris Perridas

(Click on picture above for Live Science article)

H.P. Lovecraft wrote in his At the Mountains of Madness, “These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the “Shoggoths” in his frightful Necronomicon … When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good supply of Shoggoths, they allowed other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes, extirpating any whose presence became troublesome.”

There are aliens amongst us!

This new and real-life scientific discovery not only brings up an image of shoggoths, but also John Campbell’s Antarctic novel whose monster was most famously portrayed by James Arness – another vegetable alien. Life is strange enough here; what will we find “out there”?

(Click on image above for link to The Thing From Another World)

The new report on this half-vegetable, half-sea slug thing from beneath the waves states:
A green sea slug appears to be part animal, part plant. It’s the first critter discovered to produce the plant pigment chlorophyll.  The sneaky slugs seem to have stolen the genes that enable this skill from algae that they’ve eaten. With their contraband genes, the slugs can carry out photosynthesis — the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy. “They can make their energy-containing molecules without having to eat anything,” said Sidney Pierce, a biologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.