Slugging it out

Have you ever encountered leopard slugs in the throes of passion? They may lack grace, but some of our toughskinned mollusc species are a curiously beautiful sight

- Marianne Taylor

GARDENERS have been at war with slugs since the dawn of time (or, rather, the dawn of gardening). They munch our prize plants and offer little mitigation to make such crimes forgivable, lacking beauty, grace or other charming attributes. The best we can do is to remind ourselves that some other delightful (and declining) animals, such as hedgehogs and thrushes, might come along and eat them.

Slugs may be unprepossessing, but they have a noble heritage. The phylum Mollusca is mostly marine and includes an array of bivalves and snails, the brainy octopuses and their kin, plus the nudibranchs or sea slugs in their myriad colourful and strangely shaped forms. Slugs don't form a clear-cut taxonomic group and are best described as 'land-dwelling gastropods with no shell or a greatly reduced shell'. Other features include two pairs of sensory tentacles, the smooth mantle behind the head, which bears a large breathing pore or pneumostome, and the tubercles, which form ridges on the body.