Sluggin' Along: Just Hangin' Around

Last night I went outside as usual, but something very bizarre greeted me on the porch: a tiny baby slug suspended from a hanging flower pot by a thread of mucus! Yes, slugs can "spin." Of course, they don't have spinnerets like spiders, but they can secrete mucus in such a way as to use it as a kind of bungee-rope to drop down from branches, leaves, pots, etc. Nevertheless, the thread of mucus is just as thin as a spider's silk. Why do they do this? I have no idea. I mean, you might hypothesize that the slug simply wants to get from Point A to Point B, but considering their poor eyesight, how do they know they're up high and want to get down on the floor? It's peculiar, all right, but as you've hopefully learned from my blog, a creature as seemingly simple as a slug holds many mysteries that even scientists don't know. To know everything, you'd have to be God. Now, some species do hang by mucus while mating (i.e. Limax maximus), but as this was a juvenile and of a species that doesn't mate that way, I don't really know what it was doing.

Well, here are the photos I got of this little guy. It was a difficult shoot, as the night wind and my breath kept moving him about and he kept squirming about himself. Moreover, it was so cold! Many of the photos didn't turn out, but I managed to get a few good ones. I mainly wanted to get a shot of his back so I could identify the species. Turns out he's just a baby Lehmannia valentiana, the common species in our yard.

At one point, after reviewing the photos I'd already taken, I looked up to find that he was gone, thread and all. My first thought was naturally that Katie had something to do with his disappearance, but no! After looking around a bit, I discovered him on the floor where he'd dropped. Then I measured him and found him to be only about 0.5 cm long. So tiny and cute!