Slugs could have saved me from house painting
ON West Dartmoor, one of the wettest places to live in Britain, it is hard to keep a house which is painted white from eventually turning a grubby shade of browny-green.
Especially if you live near a road where, on rainy days, passing vehicles throw up a nice coating of mud which provides the perfect nutritious substrate for all manner of moisture-loving organisms.
I have been taking advantage of recent sunny days to give my exterior walls a much-needed lick of paint. I could have saved myself a bit of time by opting for a paint colour the shade of algae, but have opted for what is the norm in these parts – bright white, with black window sills. And very smart it should look, for at least a year before the next coating of mould and algae gets a foothold.
Anyway, as I was moving bits and pieces from the side of one wall I came across a daytime hiding place for numerous slugs. So that’s where they hide out! I thought. And among them was a particularly large individual.
I am pretty forgiving when it comes to slugs as they have provided some wildlife highlights for me over the years. I was part of a team which visited Borneo in 2018 in search of species unknown to science, which identified a new kind of semi-slug (half-way between a snail and slug) – and as a result I even have my name on a scientific paper in the Journal of Molluscan Studies no less.
I have also written before in the WMN about my search for the monster ash black slug, which I tracked down at night in a Dartmoor woodland. Not only is it the UK’s largest slug, but given it is capable of growing to over 20cm in length, this giant gastropod is also reputed to be the world’s largest land slug.
Anyway, the slug I came across lurking at the base of my house wall over the weekend was about half that size. It’s colour suggested it might be a yellow slug, but certain defining features identified it as a green cellar slug – a fairly common and widespread species.
Not all slugs are pests with an appetite for our seedlings and veg, however, and this species actually eats mould and algae.
Wish that I had a few more of them – they could have saved me a paint job by keeping my house walls a little whiter with all their algae munching.