Photo of the Week
by Freeman F. & Mary Daniels Brown
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.
Week of May 21, 2000
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Photographed at Northwest Trek, Eatonville, WA, May 20, 2000. The Slug Festival was in progress when we visited Northwest Trek. Slug-shaped yellow signs, each with a sentence-long slug fact, lined the main walkway, but nowhere did we see an exhibit of native slugs. Nature made an official exhibit unnecessary. On a minor path we came across this robust slug and its trail of slime. As the insert shows, the slug would have just fit into an empty film canister. Frommer's Washington & Oregon, 6th edition, pages 226 - 227, has an interesting sidebar on slugs in the Pacific Northwest: The only native species is the banana slug, which lives up to five years and grows up to a foot long. Slug slime makes an instant highway upon which a slug races 0.007 miles per hours... 3 to 4 inches per minute. Slugs can protect themselves by secreting copious amounts of slime, which makes them unpalatable to predators such as shrews, beetles, crows and garter snakes.