Saucy sea slugs

This week is Fresh Science week, a government-funded program to get the kiddies excited by science.

Dr Scott Cummins certainly seems to have hit on the right note about how to go about this - he and his colleagues from the University of Queensland have been talking about the seductive secrets of the sea slug.

Cummins and his team have uncovered a potent mix of chemicals which acts like a cross between Chanel No 5 and Viagra.

The powerful sex attractant or pheromone helps the near blind sea creatures find each other and stimulates them to mate.

"If we can understand how pheromones work in sea slugs - how the slugs detect them and how they influence slug behaviour - we may be able to enhance the management of similar marine animals in aquaculture," Cummins said.

"We may also be able to develop powerful new tools to eliminate pest species by disrupting this form of communication."

Cummins, a postdoctoral fellow in UQ's School of Integrative Biology, said sea slugs spent most of their days cruising the ocean floor alone.

But during summer, something triggered hundreds of them to gather together to breed. And the "party" can last for days.

"Exactly how sea slugs signal each other that it's time to gather has long been a mystery," he said.

"We found that sea slugs developed an ingenious and potent solution to finding a mate-they released a cocktail of small proteins as a pheromone message."

The protein pheromones - fittingly named attractin, enticin, temptin and seductin-are secreted by the animals to attract a mate.

This discovery is the first example of a multi-component attraction pheromone used by a marine animal. It is generated using genes unique to each species.

"To sea slugs these pheromones are powerful," Cummins said. "Just a teaspoonful in a swimming-pool-sized tank can make all the sea slugs love struck and send them into a mating frenzy. And we can now synthesise these pheromones in the laboratory."

Now that they've decoded this pheromone message, the team, along with collaborators at the University of Texas Medical Branch in the US, are working to find similar pheromone messages in other marine animals.