The spotted salamander gets energy from the sun through the use of photosynthetic algae. To find out how, Erin Graham, a science fellow at Temple, incubated salamander eggs in water containing radioactive carbon-14. She found that algae inside the eggs take up the isotope, producing radioactive glucose. Now that one vertebrate has been shown to use photosynthesis, Graham says there could be others. "Anything that lays eggs in water would be a good candidate, as algae would have easy access to the eggs.