A Slug Named Skippy

I spied a hyphenated slug trail the other day.

Slug trails themselves are not at all unusual around here. We have lots of slugs, and they're always trying to get somewhere else, even if the place they end up isn't any different from where they started. The main reason a slug produces a snot trail is to make a Slip 'N' Slide so it doesn't scratch up its belly. (It's not really called a belly--they call that whole bottom portion a "foot," even though it's really more like a zamboni.) Also, it is thought that other slugs can find each other by following their trails if they're feeling sociable. And, of course, theoretically an individual can always use them to find its way back to where it's been, although it never does.

There are many uses for the mucus they produce to make their trails. One memorable ancestral slug of my youth used his to make sure I never walked barefoot in the grass again. Human observers are able to examine the slug's thought process by means of its trail, which usually wraps up in less than the width of a standard sidewalk. There's the heroic first sally, followed by an arc of doubt, indecision, looping, and despair, culminating in desiccation or the Rapture, depending. The Rapture, in slugdom, is when the good slugs are lifted up and go straight to bird shit.

This particular slug trail worried me because it was like when you don't have enough paint on your roller and there are dry bits on your wall at regular intervals. Slugs need a lot of paint on their rollers. They manufacture mucus from an area just below their mouths, right about where their foot starts.

At first I was very excited about my hyphenated slug trail in case it was evidence  of a sense of sluggular humor. Slugs are known for randiness and ick, but not really humor, so much. But what I saw on the sidewalk was precisely the joke in the comic strip Family Circus. Little Billy is supposed to come straight home but never does. He goes all over the place! Ha ha! It's such a staple of hilarity you can count on seeing it every couple weeks. Could my hyphenated gastropod be pulling a funny? Comedy has to start somewhere. There's a lot of evolution involved before you get to true stand-up, as pioneered by the meerkat family.

We like it damp here, and so do slugs. You could dang near navigate by slug trail on a full moon night. So when a Facebook friend posted a photo of a heavily slimed tree and asked whatever it could be--tree sap was the prevailing guess--I informed him he was looking at the aftermath of a slug orgy. I was right, too, but for some reason no one believes me anymore. [At least, not since the time I declared that a group of caterpillars once beat up a famous entomologist, trashed his place, stole his coin collection, and bought a bunch of meth.]

But I knew it was a slug orgy because one of the many things slugs do with their vaunted mucus is goo themselves up to a tree branch and hang from a slime string to have sex, and lots of it, and they aren't at all averse to doing it in a group. Everybody has the same equipment. A slug is not just an undifferentiated bag of snot: each slug has one vagina, one penis, one nostril, one mouth, one anus, and one foot. Pity the poor forensic artist who has to work with that description.

The hyphens! That's it! Slugs got only one foot! They're hopping!

Ambulatory Snot and Gastropodcasts

Our friend Mike once described a mutual friend as being "so lazy, if she shit the bed she'd just roll it out with a stick." Which puts me in mind of slug poop.

I hadn't given much thought to slug poop in, like, ever, until I learned that certain slugs have developed a hankering for baby birds. They climb right up the tree and snarf away. No one has actually observed the slugs doing this. We infer it because baby birds have been found with debilitating slug injuries and also because the slugs leave their poop behind. Slugs poop? It's obvious, I guess--everything poops--but somehow I never visualized slug poop. Even in an election season.

If I'm being honest, I sort of imagined slugs didn't poop at all. Just sort of ate stuff and got bigger and bigger, like a constipated mucus ball. But poop they do.

I had to look it up. Turns out there's more to slug poop than meets the eye, which, on the good days, it doesn't. Slugs (or, as snails call them, "the homeless") sometimes poop and then roll it up. Their anus and lips are very close together--nothing is that far apart on a slug--and sometimes they pull out a string of poop with their lips and poke it under their foot, and then they roll it into a ball and sleep on it. Not because they want to ponder it or anything. They're just sleepy.

We know this because there are slug and snail aficionados who lovingly observe their pets, and pooping is one of the only things they do. It is possible that slug owners have limited social connections.

Slugs have only the one foot, and yet they do not hop. They mosey at best. But although there is not that much to a slug, they're way more than ambulatory snot. Like us, they're mostly water. Unlike most of us, they have every sexual organ in the book. They can even have sex with themselves. You can too, but not as spectacularly, because you're not as well equipped, no matter what you say anonymously on the internet.

So I didn't know what slug poop looks like, but most people really aren't that good at poop ID. How many times have you heard a disgruntled roommate holler "Who left all this shit here?" See, they don't know. So it's helpful to get a good description. What does a gastropodcast look like? Is it tidy, or untoward? Well, slug poop has been described as "pretzel-shaped," but that's not helpful. Do they mean the curly kind? The long stick kind? The short fat peanut-butter-filled kind? We're left in the dark.

One of the other interesting things about slug poop is it's like a little commuter bus for nematodes. Nematodes like to eat the same things slugs eat--rotting vegetation--and that is, by its nature, transitory. Once the vegetation has been eaten up, where do the nematodes go? They're really little and can't make time on the road the way a good slug can. So they get eaten by the slug and carted to the next good meal and pop out the other end good as new.

Yes, they get pooped out. You'd be tired too if you spent much time in a slug gut, which has a grinder in it. Scientists still don't know if the traveling nematodes have any control over when the bus pulls out of the station, but they're eager to find out. Yes: there are scientists who are eager to discover whether tiny worms are driving the slug poop bus. And that is why I still love humans.

A Logical Phallusy

We thought we'd taken care of the Spring Ant Influx a few months ago. The regular army showed up every day for about a month and we batted them back with Windex until they gave up and went home, clean and shiny. All was quiet on the Northwestern Front for a few weeks and then they got modern. No longer are they sending out a battalion and risking mass obliteration. A grain of oatmeal, a stray fruit smear, even swatted fly meat, each will accumulate a score of ants within fifteen minutes of deposition. Their communications technology is sophisticated. The little buggers are now dropping formic acid and forming flash mobs.

But I don't have any garden slugs. I've got a hosta buffet out there for them and no one has showed up. You're supposed to dispatch slugs with beer, but I don't like to share. Slugs and ants are pretty much the entire pest roster out here. We don't have many mosquitoes, gnats, ticks, Republicans, or black flies. And other people in town are complaining about the slugs, so I know they're around. So I got to thinking:

Whereas: We have ants.
Whereas: We don't have slugs.
Therefore: The ants must have creeped out the slugs.

I felt pretty confident about this conclusion. I do have a vestigial science degree and I understand how reasoning works, because I've seen it in the outside world. For instance:

Whereas: Barack Obama is black.
Whereas: I want to mine coal without regard to environmental or human health consequences.
Therefore: Voters should be required to show photo I.D. at the polls.

I can see no fallacy in this conclusion, unless you count the logical one. But when you're practicing home science, you need to be open to new evidence that may alter your conclusions. And that's what we found on a walk the other day. There was a large old tree in the parking strip. And it was covered with a foot-wide column of slime to a height of twelve feet, where the trunk tipped out over the sidewalk. I know what has happened here. A slug orgy has happened here. Our common garden slugs mate while suspended on a string of slime. They need to get high enough to be able to hang off something, and they're well hung. Each slug has his or her own giant diaphanous sky-blue penis which it wraps around its mate's and they remain in this position, twirling lasciviously, for hours. They are having way more fun than you ever thought of having. And the huge amount of slime on this tree indicates a multi-slug event, similar to what we used to call, in college, "spring break." I marveled at the amount of goo that each slug had to emit to reach those heights. "They're teenagers," Dave explained.

So because I now have new evidence, I have revised my conclusion. I now believe I don't have any slugs in my yard because the party is somewhere else this year, and the ants have nothing to do with it. Someone might also want to re-think the other conclusion, above.

Whereas: Barack Obama is president.
Whereas: I want to mine coal without regard to environmental or human health consequences.
Therefore: Gay marriage is a threat to the fabric of our civilization.

A Putty Good Idea

A local homeowner burnt up his house during the recent cold snap, and all he was trying to do was warm up his chickens. That's what you get when you try to raise chickens in the city, some are clucking. But the whole disaster could have been averted had he gone all in on the urban farming. What he needed was a cow.

There is a growing appreciation for working with nature rather than at odds with it, not only because it's the right thing to do but because it's the most effective thing to do.

So in this case, when the heat lamp overheated in the chicken coop and the house was threatened, our city farmer would have been in much better shape had he thought to keep a cow handy. A man in Rogersville, Tennessee recently got all upset at his neighbor for allowing his cow to lick his house, doing $100 worth of damage, he claims. I don't know what constitutes $100 worth of damage. Maybe the cow got some pieces of the man's siding going the wrong way. But for sure a well-licked house would be much better protected against fire than an unlicked one, and besides, it would be natural.

I've tried to apply the principle to my own life. We had no sooner put up an addition on our house than a flicker elected to drill a giant hole in it. It was way up on our tower, which made it hard to get at. After a few weeks the flicker abandoned his project to go perforate someone else's house, and we were left with a sizable hole that would likely collect moisture and begin to rot, forty feet up in the air. How can we apply a natural solution to the problem? I pondered the question for a while. What we needed was something that would fill the hole and prevent moisture damage, and the answer was hanging right there in front of my nose: sperm plugs.

Sperm plugs are left inside females by various copulating males in the animal kingdom, either to prevent insemination by a rival male or to prevent leakage of semen. Many species employ the sperm plug, not including humans, who have instead evolved the ability to do laundry. All that I would need to do is render the hole in question sexually appealing to one or the other of these species and nature would take care of it herself. In other words, I would need to create the conditions that might induce an animal to do to our house what those heating subcontractors did to it in 1996. Possible sperm-plugging candidates would include the boa constrictor, the banana slug, the masked palm civet, or the

monkey. ("Why not something in the crab family," I hear you saying, and true, the spermatophores, or sperm packets, used by crabs might be a suitable patch, but one would want to go with a shore crab, with its simple ellipsoidal capsules of uniform thickness, and not your hermit crabs, whose spermatophores are complex, pedunculated structures; because who needs that drama? Also, most crabs do not care for heights.)

Boas seemed problematic. If there is a boa constrictor capable of scaling a vertical wall forty feet, I don't care to know about it. Slugs are prevalent and famously peckish; perhaps if we planted a hosta in the window, we could attract a raft of them, at least for a snack; but I tend to founder on the question of what passes for sex appeal in a slug, and am disinclined to do the research. Which brings us to the monkeys. They're clearly capable of getting up there, as we all know from that documentary about the Empire State Building. Unfortunately, we're very shy of monkeys in Oregon, although with climate change we might hope for an expansion of their range. This might take a while, though. And if we're going for those champion sperm-pluggers, the ring-tailed lemurs, which are native to Madagascar, we'd have to wait for plate tectonics to deliver us one, and that would take even longer, by which time they might not even be in the mood.

The more I think about eco-engineering the deposition of a coagulated post-coital gelatinous protein mass, the more I think: you know? Wood putty might work.