A rainy evening is the best time to hunt for slugs. Or to find them when you're looking for something else. These turned up on my spider hunt.
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| The chocolate slug, aka licorice slug, chocolate arion. Arion rufus. |
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| Same slug, hunkered down after I moved a leaf, exposing more of his orange striped fringe. |
These slugs are an introduced species. Its colour can vary from yellow-brown to chocolate to black, when it looks identical to the black slug, Arion ater, different only internally. Black slugs, they say, are not present here on the island. So this next slug is probably a chocolate, too.
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| There's a hint of the orange foot. |
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| Big polypore on ground. With two slugs. |
This was taken after dark; the mushroom was just a darker patch on the ground. I didn't see the slugs until I looked at the photo. The one on the left is another chocolate slug; on the right there's a banana slug, Ariolimax columbianus.
I don't know why these slugs are named after food. Appetizing, right?
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Una tarde con lluvia es el mejor momento para buscar babosas. O para encontrarlas cuando buscas otra cosa. Estas aparecieron durante mi búsqueda de arañas.
La primera es la que llamamos la babosa de chocolate o de anis. Es una babosa importada desde Europa. Puede venir en colores desde amarillo/café a color chocolate, hasta un negro puro. Aquí se le puede notar los bordes del pie, de color anaranjado con rayas negras.
La babosa negra, una especie casi idéntica, por lo menos en cuanto se puede observar sin hacer cirugía, no se halla, dicen, aquí en la isla. Así que esta negra ha de ser una babosa de anís.
En la última foto, tomada después de anochecer, salen dos babosas, comiendo un hongo políporo. La de la izquierda es otra chocolate. A la derecha, una babosa "plátano", nativo y común aquí.
¿Porqé será que les llaman a estos animalitos por comidas, y además por comidas deliciosas?
When I was a kid, I showed our elderly neighbour these arion slugs. He picked one up with his bare hands (something we'd learned not to do because of the difficulty of getting the slime off our hands) and tell us they would eat these back in Germany. So perhaps their nomenclature goes further than merely describing their appearance :)
ReplyDeleteBet they don't taste like chocolate, though! :)
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing, some time ago, a description of how to prepare a slug for eating. It involved several steps of boiling, draining, re-boiling, etc. Not something I was inspired to try.