The Sluggish Secret of Slime

See a slug? Don’t rush off for that bottle of salt or bowl of beer (two favorite methods of execution for this shell-less mollusk.) Instead, check out this KQED Deep Look video.

According to Deep Look, slime is a slug’s greatest defense. The article accompanying the video states, “Banana slug slime contains nasty chemicals that numb the tongue of any animal that attempts to nibble it, discouraging predators like raccoons, who have to go to the trouble of removing the slime if they want to eat the slug. But this is just one of many ways slugs depend on slime, and they use it for everything from locomotion to nutrition.”

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8 Comments
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Adam Harrold
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Adam Harrold
6 years ago

Thanks Kym. I enjoy learning about nature.
I saw my first wild iris of the year yesterday.

Shana DuBois
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Shana DuBois
6 years ago

Just yesterday I was telling a friend from France about the banana slug! Cool slug!

Mogtx
Guest
6 years ago

I cant remember the last time i saw a banana slug .that may be a sign of things that are happening to the slug .

Guest
Guest
Guest
6 years ago

I have banana slugs fairly frequently. For whatever reason, they don’t bother the garden crops. The milky slug and the red slug are garden terrors though. Truly they are the only pests on which I wage war.

Bunny Wilder
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Bunny Wilder
6 years ago

We used to have a bunch of slugs and then I didn’t see any for a couple
decades and now they are back. I never kill them. There’s plenty of forest so I just remove them to greener pastures.

Guest
Guest
Guest
6 years ago
Reply to  Bunny Wilder

I used to have a recurrent fantasy about throwing a garden snail over the fence into my neighbor’s yard. Who then repeated the action. Again and again until the same snail fell back into my yard from the neighbor on the other side, having circumnavigate the globe.

Dan Fuller
Guest
Dan Fuller
6 years ago
Reply to  Guest

That’s some arm, you have, to make a toss like that!!! ;-]]