Why is this animal unusual?
When it eats algae, it doesn’t digest everything. It keeps the tiny green solar panels from the plant cells and stores them in its own body, where they go on working.
Why does it look like that?
The “ears” are sensors for smelling the water. The “wool” is a coat of leaf-shaped lobes, each filled with stolen green pigment and tipped in pink or white.
Strangest biological feature
Stolen solar power. It’s one of the very few animals on Earth that can get energy from sunlight.
Why is it strange?
Every leaf sheep is both male and female at the same time.
Interesting behavioral facts
It spends its life grazing on a single type of fuzzy green algae, slowly, like a very small sheep in a very small field.
Records held
One of a handful of animals known to keep stolen chloroplasts working inside their own bodies – a trick called kleptoplasty.
