SLUG LOVE AND SPIDER HATESLUG LOVE AND SPIDER HATE

Something about snails drove me wild as a child. A youth of the plains, I had no access to the sea, nor to the moist haunts of land snails. Conchology and Colorado scarcely went together, but this failed to dim my passion. At least I could obtain seashells, from the Denver Museum gift shop, from dealers’ catalogs, from my Shell-of-the-Month club, from a grandfather calling on aunts in Florida. So marine mollusks captured my passions in toto from age seven to eleven, and A. Hyatt Verrill’s Shell Collector’s Handbook became gospel as well as treasure map. The seven seas were mine in Aurora, Colorado, shining through the glossy nacre of my cowries and cones, olives and volutes, conches, helmets, and whelks.

Yet land snails held out a special mystique, and I don’t doubt I would have traded toes to find some. When my father could be inveigled into stopping the car beside prairie creeks, at least I could gather tiny stream snails from the vegetation; unimpressive, but they were snails. Then when my grandfather took my brother, Tom, and me back East in the Packard and we called in at the Big Spring in Missouri’s Ozarks, I had no eyes for the usual souvenirs: for there I found my first land snail, laying its silver streak on the wall of a cave beside the blue pool of the spring. I was transported with excitement, and the creature occupied me for the rest of the long, hot trip, then died.

I often wonder how I would have reacted to the ordinary abundance of varicolored helices in the Hawaiian rain forest, or even in an English garden, had I been emplaced there at, say, age eight. Any English garden would have been a magic garden then; a thrush’s midden would have eclipsed a pirate’s treasure trove in glory. Come to think of it, my other total passion in those days was for suits of armor—just the objects, divorced from their purpose; I never cared for warplay or toy soldiers. (What, the analytical reader might ask, does this say about my sense of confidence in childhood, that my objects of keenest covet were snails and chainmail? “Gimme Shelter,” or what?) I reckon a trip to the Armory of the Tower of London, followed by a ramble in a rainy, snail-ridden churchyard, would have finished me off from overstimulus: cardiac arrest at eight.

Instead, I nearly perished from withheld gratification. The Young Collector, by Wheeler MacMillen (New York: Appleton & Co., 1928), informed me clearly that “land snails can be found almost anywhere,” and that “slugs and snails abound in wooded places. . . . Look for them in ditches and river beds and muddy banks, for as a rule they love moisture.” Oh, I looked—and looked and looked—in every moist and muddy place I could find, which were rather few in the Colorado summer, except when thunderstorms filled the ditches to overflowing and muddied the raw, young gardens. I combed such places, young slug me, in my slime track of desire. Thank goodness my mother was a naturalist. But it did no good.

Eventually, having far overspent my allowance and more on costly exotic mollusks, and with my land-snail collection still consisting of one, I decided on a shift of emphasis. One could hardly call me fickle; for four years I devoted myself to my beloved snails, but they spurned me all the while. So when I began to notice bluish skippers and black swallowtails in the parks and gardens, who could blame me for switching my affections? At last I fled the muddy banks for the sunny fields of butterflies, and satisfaction was mine.

Horror, too, as it turned out. Somehow, I had gathered about me a terror of spiders and their webs at least equal in intensity to my ecstasy over snails. Hanging about in the rain, in my prereformation days, I ran little risk of butting heads with spiders. But as I began to take to the sunny glades in pursuit of Psyche, out jumped Arachne and sat down beside me, and I freaked out.

I’ll never forget my first face-to-face with a golden-and-black garden spider, a great Argiope. I simply ran, and screamed, and never looked back. And I wouldn’t come home until my father arrived on the scene and guaranteed safe passage. All my brother had to do to excite revulsion in my heart (and get what he wanted) was to threaten me with an innocuous piece of cobweb. “Dust!” he exclaimed in mirth and amazement, “he’s afraid of dust!” It always worked. Or he would lure me into a grandmother’s cellar, then turn the lights out and proclaim the presence of spiders. I’d do anything to be saved.

Of all the monster movies, the black-widow scene in The Incredible Shrinking Man and the strange western Tarantula were by far the most terrifying to me, yielding many nightmares. “Here be spiders” might have been my watchword for panic, and by comparison I never could understand the literary and mythic concern with dragons. If I were to awaken and find a jumping spider on the ceiling over my bed, I’d pupate instantly beneath the covers, school or Saturday plans notwithstanding. I’d as soon perish as face it, because if life had to be like that, well, it just wasn’t worth living.

Obviously, I couldn’t go on this way. Fascinating cellars and caves and barns were psychologically out-of-bounds, not to mention many an otherwise seductive butterfly haunt. Running and screaming became socially penalizing as I approached adolescence, and I had one strike against me as a butterfly collector already. I tried to adopt an attitude of camaraderie toward spiders. After all, weren’t we colleagues in the pursuit of insects, differing chiefly in the nature of our nets? Through the power of positive thought I came to be able to tolerate the knowledge that there were spiders in the same county as me, or even large field, but if I should come up against a bulbous-bodied orb weaver in the middle of its web, or inadvertently touch either animal or silk, especially with my face, the bottom fell out of my belly once again.

Several experiences helped me to overcome my arachnophobia. First, I worked as a summer ranger-naturalist in Sequoia National Park in 1969. One of my interpretive duties involved leading groups through Crystal Cave. Famous for an endemic spider, this fine marble cavern was protected from unauthorized entry by a wrought-iron grate in the form of a spiderweb, with a big black spider perched in the middle for a handle. But no one had seen the noted resident for years. So I dedicated my lunch hours to crawling about with a flashlight, in pursuit of the endemic troglobite. I found many of these especially unintimidating, little pink spiders, and watched them trap springtails in their tiny, weak webs. These became my first spider friends. (Furthermore, I encountered my first tarantula in Sequoia’s chaparral that summer and while I did not pick it up, I did photograph it on my boot. I was coming along.)

Next, in 1971 and 1972, I dwelt in a 330-year-old, timber-framed and part-thatched yeoman farmer’s cottage in England. We had no choice but to share our quarters with the immense English house spiders, Tegenaria gigantea. Since their webs were not orbed and their bodies not bulbous—the real psychological red flags—I could cope with them, despite their impressive size. By midwinter, unable to have a cat, we adopted the largest of the spiders as a pet, christened it Cat, and became watchful of its behavior. Perhaps I imagined our shared regard, but the remarkable actions I observed on Cat’s part (following me from room to room, etc.) certainly raised my own regard for Cat and its kind. For the first time I felt real affection for a spider, and that was a great (if anthropomorphic) step forward.

In 1974 I was privileged to watch the great entomological ambassador of the American Museum of Natural History, Alice Gray, in action. She presented her live classroom demonstration for a meeting of the Xerces Society, including the laying on of tarantulas. I declined, but watched, rapt. Then a couple of years later in Colorado, when I had the chance to handle a friend’s splendid Mexican red-kneed tarantula, I took it. I’ve never forgotten the friend’s name (Cosmo Blank) nor the lovely feeling of a furry great spider perambulating my palm.

Finally, my work and travels in Papua New Guinea in 1977 brought me inexorably into contact with a great array of tropical spiders. To my immense relief, none of them ever pounced from overhead, ate my face, or penetrated my sleeping quarters. And they were, of course, both beautiful and fascinating. I photographed them by the dozen and lost my fear of confronting them on the jungle trail (although, admittedly, I seldom went first; or if I did, my stout net served as a webwand, as it does today).

But my ultimate trial came one day when I was tramping the bush on Kiriwina, one of the Trobriand Islands, in search of eclectus parrots and Ulysses swallowtails. As ever, a group of curious villagers accompanied us. We encountered a very large, very bulbous, very leggy spider astride its three-foot web. I was about to snap its portrait, when, mantislike, a brown arm shot out, nabbed the treat, and popped it into a smiling child’s mouth. Crunch, crunch. I reeled but withheld a retch as she popped the body like a grape under her tongue. The legs cracked like those of a prawn. My eyes must have been as big as hers had grown when I’d stepped from the plane, a bearded man with a butterfly net. Now here was the great white hunter turned green from witnessing a simple, everyday act of arachnophagy.

OK. Incident withstood . . . or so I thought. We had gone on a short distance when the snatch happened again. Only this time, the dainty was proffered to me, with many giggles. I won’t drag this out. I declined the kind offer, and no one was offended (they never expected me to take it). But I did ask the girl to place the spider on my forearm, the whitest, most sensitive part. I felt every leg and watched its fangs and spinneret intently as the spider struggled for a hold. I photographed it, then tossed it gently into the bush before someone could eat it.

Sometimes I have regretted my lack of adventurousness in turning down the spider-snack. W. S. Bristowe, traveling in Siam a half century ago, resolved to sample the indigenous insect foods of the Laos. He found that soft-bodied spiders had “a nice crisp exterior and soft interior of soufflé consistency which is by no means unpleasant.” The giant spider Nephila, an orb weaver, he found tasted like lettuce or raw potato; and he suffered no ill effects. My tale would be better had I possessed Bristowe’s fortitude! But I suspect that, given the opportunity again, I would still pass. Anyway, I survived, and that was the transcendence of my unfortunate fear.

Just as well, too, for when I came to Washington State to live, I found it to be Spider City. In fact, one of my first jobs took me into an abandoned farm in rural Snohomish County, a site I named “The Vale of Spiders” for the thousands of alien orb weavers (Araneus diadematus) that slung their lines between every available pair of supports. I came to find that one cannot enjoy late summer in western Washington without a tolerance for these and the many native spiders, for they lie in wait everywhere for flies, grasshoppers, and arachnophobes. (My mother wanted to bring me to Seattle as a child. Had she succeeded, infantile paralysis would have been my certain fate. One look at the spiders outside and I never would have moved again.)

I’ve often been thankful that I dealt with my problem before I settled here for good. I still don’t sleep with spiders by preference, though leggy Pholcus phalangioides dangles over my bed unhindered; and big chestnut-bodied spiders (not the same species as Cat, but the even more robust Callobius severus) hunt from many a cranny around the window sashes and commonly land in the tub. Nor do I gobble them down for snacks, unless they hide on the wrong side of a blackberry. But I am quite happy to live among them. And that is good, because live with them I do.

Last autumn, we invited Rod Crawford, Spider Man at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum, to be our guest for a week as he surveyed our arachnofauna. Even hampered by an October rainier than usual, his findings were impressive: over fifty species of spiders in the house, grounds, and nearby habitats, and a large array of harvestmen, pseudoscorpions, isopods, centipedes, and millipedes as well. Rod feels the count could be greatly enhanced with better weather and a wider seasonal window of sampling. Swede Park, inside and out, year-round, is happy hunting grounds indeed for the likes of Rod.

Spiders, as one learns, enhance one’s life even if one is not an arachnologist. Of course they consume flies and other bothersome insects in large numbers; but consider their beauties too—such as the crosslike pattern on the backs of the big female orb weavers so common hereabouts. Need so much as a word be written about the beauty of webs in the morning, in a misty place so generously hung about with them? Their short-lived lambency so perfectly reflects the nature of light and substance in a land where the distance from dead gray to brilliant silver is an angstrom or less, where form and formlessness mingle intermittently in the mist.

I grow more and more appreciative of spiders’ ability to disperse when I watch the rain of gossamer in summer: exodus of spiderlings ballooning wherever the breeze should take them. Or when, in April, the yellow crab spiders always appear in the daffodils: from where? Most of all, spider behavior fascinates and instructs. The eternal spinning, consuming, respinning of the web, in so many species-specific patterns; the callidity of the hunt, and the specialized manner in which each species wraps its hapless prey in no-getaway silk. Then there is spider courtship.

Where I sit and as I write, I watch the attempted mating of a pair of cross spiders in a corner of the porch. The much larger female has now repelled the skinny, randy male (apparently taking him for prey—he has to be nimble) twice. She’s sucking on a well-upholstered crane fly (atavistically familiar: they’re both European species) and here he comes again; she can’t be bothered. Climbing the sky (the web invisible against gray cloud) these silhouette spiders endlessly engage one another as the summers pass; only the individuals change. Just as endlessly may they enchant the watchful, he or she who notices and is not so silly as to turn away in fear or disgust.

Sun strikes the pair, giving them color; they engage again. In and out, he finds her line, the crane fly flexes its only free knee as the spiders pat pedipalps; then she strikes, he retreats, and you wonder how spiders ever do get mated. The male returns and supplicates with rapid strokes of his front legs, until finally getting the message she pulls in her own legs and goes still. The male addresses the female belly-to-belly, hops from his strand to hers, and they couple. A few seconds pass, and he falls abruptly away on his safety line. Four times this action repeats, as the crane fly waits, until the male retreats to his pillar. A few minutes later he comes in again on the web. She’s ready this time, her predatory mode suppressed. Coupling occurs quickly, lasting three seconds.

Fascination with this process led me to investigate what is known of how it works. Rod Crawford, the arachnologist who performed our Swede Park spider survey, supplied the following explanation. First, the male recognizes the species and maturity of the female by the presence of her pheromone in the web. Courtship takes place through vibratory means, involving a species-specific pattern of plucking and shaking the web. In its last phase, courtship involves tactile and contact-pheromone signals. This complex process explains why it takes so long to prepare for a momentary mating. This lock-and-key series of stimuli and responses serves an important function, for accidental mating with the wrong species would mean wastage of genes. Therefore, elaborate barriers to hybridization (such as this courtship sequence) have evolved.

But it doesn’t stop there. The male has previously deposited liquid semen on a thread or “sperm web,” which he has drawn into his palps prior to initiating courtship. The sperms, still in a liquid form, pass to the female through the “business end” of the palp. Fertilization requires the “docking” of the palp in the structure of the female especially modified to receive it. This may be preceded by many minutes of fruitless attempts to engage the palp. When coitus finally occurs, it results in the detachable, sperm-bearing cap breaking off. So male spiders of the orbweaving genus Araneus can only mate twice since they have two palps. This is an unusual behavior: most male spiders can mate repeatedly, and it lasts much longer, up to an hour.

The female cross spider has two sperm reservoirs, one for each of the male’s pedipalps. She may be mated only once on each side. This ensures that a successful male’s genes will be passed on—an evolutionary reward that could help justify the expensive adaptive investment in such an elaborate mechanism for mating.

On a nearby web, two males approach a single nonreceptive female, and I begin to watch it all over again. How much better this is than running and screaming . . . and how much more parsimonious.

I couldn’t live here unless I’d made my accommodation, southwest Washington being such good spider country. The irony is that it is also great snail country. At last, thirty years too late, I’ve landed in a place with snails right in my own backyard. No longer does The Young Collector fib to me—everywhere it says to seek, I seek and I find. Thirty years in the dimming, the joy at last achieved can’t be as sharp as it might have been in the fruitless anticipation of youth. Still, something of the old gut thrill brought on by the mere suggestion of the coiled creature comes back, so that curiosity wakes wide and the finding satisfies in the end. “The spiral trail,” is how Victor Scheffer, doyen of Northwest naturalists, refers to this unorthodox hunt in reporting his “notes of a snail watcher.” The noted author of Year of the Whale and Year of the Seal, accustomed to bigger game, nonetheless finds the land snails of the Puget Sound Basin well worth his watching.

In the Willapa Hills, I watch much the same assemblage of species: the beautiful yellow-and-brown striped faithful snail Monodenia fidelis, similar to Cepaea nemoralis of English thrush middens; its small relative, Vespericola columbiana, whose shell is clothed with a fine pile of short fuzz; Allogona townsendiana, named along with a warbler and a chipmunk for the great naturalist J. K. Townsend, a big, chocolate snail with a chalky cast and taupe body; and the Vancouver green snail (Haplotrema-vancouverense) of milk-white foot and moss-green shell. Each of these exhibits its own habitat distribution and behavioral and ecological patterns as it forages across the wet, succulent greengrocery called by humans the Maritime Northwest.

I think of particular snails in particular places. Townsend’s snails working the earth beneath stripped trunks of vine maples, where elk have rubbed themselves free of their itchy velvet. A faithful snail, massive, mauve-bodied, perched on the mossy crotch of an autumn-gilded maple, eight feet off the ground: another beside the westernmost Oregon iris I’ve ever seen in these hills, gracing together a clearcut bluff above Gray’s Bay. Or a Vancouver green snail, browsing a chanterelle among hemlocks beside the town dump, showing uncommon good taste in choice of entree if not establishment. The species diversity may not be high, but the pleasurable surprise of coming upon any one of these tentacled gliders never seems to diminish with familiarity. And it is especially good to reflect on the dry days of my youth and know that, almost any damp day now, I can saunter out in the rain and find green snails—green snails!—abroad on the land.

One other species that can be found locally has not excited uniform enthusiasm. Called Helix aspersa, the European brown or garden snail, it is an introduced species that has become a substantial agricultural and garden pest in some areas. An inch across, quite conical, and banded with brown and beige, H. aspersa makes a striking sight that cannot readily be confused with any of the native species. While most people revile it as a competitor in the garden, it has earned a certain dedicated clientele. Since the true escargot (H. pomatia) has become uncommon in Europe (and indeed endangered in some districts) from overharvesting, the smaller garden snail has taken over as a quite serviceable substitute for gourmet escargot, both here and abroad.

My friend Tony Kischner, proprietor of the nationally noted Shoalwater Restaurant on the nearby Long Beach Peninsula, received a curious letter from the Washington State Department of Agriculture. Tony reports that the officials requested his cooperation in controlling the European brown garden snail, asking him to cease and desist rearing it for gastronomic purposes. The Shoalwater had long since given up the chancy practice of snail husbandry in favor of foraging for wild mollusks in the nearby woodlands, where they occur commonly. The results draw praise from many of the restaurant’s customers, who probably neither know nor care that the French consider Helix aspersa a decidedly inferior snail.

Tony had the perfect answer for the agricultural officer. “Perhaps you should not overlook the ‘French Solution’ to snail control; this would require only that we educate our own people to consume the tasty, protein-rich morsels faster than they can consume our crops. . . . I would suggest that our practice of plucking mature snails from the local countryside to serve in our restaurants is not inconsistent with your Department’s goal of reducing or eliminating the Helix aspersa population in the state. We just find that garlic butter is a much more palatable way to do away with them than any available pesticide.”

This talk of edible snails brings to mind my first experience with the true escargot, Helix pomatia, the gastronome’s gastropod. While rambling over the orchid-rich North Downs in Surrey with my good friend Jeremy Thomas during a springtime in Britain years ago, I spotted a gigantic live snail. Fully four inches in circumference, the spherical brown shell could quite properly be called awesome. Jeremy identified it as an edible snail, otherwise known as the apple snail or Roman snail. The former name, he explained, derives from the species’ shape; the latter, from its presumed introduction to Britain by the Romans. Even during the days of the Roman Empire, this mollusk was appreciated for its succulence and brought along to lend its considerable weight to the support of the legions.

The snail in question turned out to be amorous as well as enormous. Many snails, of course, are hermaphroditic, but most species exchange sperms anyway in order to maintain genetic variation in the population. As I stroked the generous foot of the downland snail, it expanded and stretched to cover my entire index finger with its slick flesh. This is exactly how one snail behaves with another, but I didn’t realize that and was caught all unawares. All of a sudden I felt a small, sharp pain as something pricked my finger. It was the love dart of the Roman snail!

I knew that snails exchanged love darts in copulo. However, I always thought they contained the sperms themselves. It turns out, as later reading has revealed, that sperm exchange is effected in the manner usual for “higher” animals. The calcareous darts precede ejaculation, and they probably serve a readiness role, enhancing the partners’ receptivity.

Adrian Forsyth, in A Natural History of Sex (Scribners, 1986), points out that the love dart is composed of calcium carbonate, an essential material for snails. A hermaphroditic animal faces more of an investment by receiving sperms than by donating them, since it will have to gestate the resultant embryos. Therefore, the female part wants to know that her partner is a worthy male to mate with. Forsyth suggests that the presentation of a substantial packet of calcium carbonate, in the form of a love dart, may act to prove the suitor’s fitness as a father—“an honest advertisement,” as he puts it. In any case, the elaborate spearpoint, half an inch or so long, does act to stimulate the female gonads of the love-darted snail.

Seems drastic. Anyway, it had no such effect on me, though I was surprised. And it makes me wonder: the Romans, who so admired this animal, numbered among them some keen observers of natural history. Also, Cupid (or Eros) belonged to the Roman pantheon. Could it be that Cupid’s arrow has its origin in the amatory behavior of the Roman snail? The analogy is irresistible.

The mating of snails and slugs deserves serious attention. Given another of its kind to envelop in copious slime, instead of a dry and barren finger, a snail in heat is a single-minded and devoted suitor. The wet blending of bodies that ensues strikes me as the most complete merging I know in nature. I have written of butterfly courtship as being a beautiful thing to watch, and it is. But the genteel connection they achieve seems almost chaste by comparison, and certainly lacks the passion of full-blown slug love. (Reputable zoologists write of the smacking kisses that accompany snail mating, and of the real likelihood that they undergo a neuromuscular crisis akin to orgasm.) And, lasting for minutes or hours, these molluskan mergers make the momentary matings of cross spiders (and deer) seem stinting indeed.

I was privileged to watch Roman snails couple when I returned to the same spot in Surrey this past summer. This time I kept my hands to myself and just watched. I was happy to see the great univalves present in large numbers, for it was not long before that my colleague Susan Wells and I had to place the species in the international Invertebrate Red Data Book due to its rarity in most of Europe. Despite its fecundity, the snail’s good taste has brought its numbers to the brink of endangerment. Happily, the result of such couplings is a lot more snails. With adequate protection, the edible snail should survive to grace many more tables and nature walks.

We have no apple snails in Willapa, but we do have banana slugs by the millions. Commonly we watch them rapt in the same sort of embrace as I have described, mantle to mantle, so perfectly matched that one seems the reflection of the other, until the writhing begins. These great, shell-less snails occur abundantly throughout much of the Pacific Northwest. But if they sold as well as books of slug jokes and recipes for their preparation, they might become rare too. And if they just had a shell, they might give escargot a serious slither to the skillet.

A good-sized banana slug would furnish two to three times the flesh of the garden snail, or more like the quantity of a Roman. But most people (even those who consume oysters and escargot with gusto) would no more eat a slug than a bulbous-bodied spider. So the slug recipe books to which I referred, and they are a hot item, are just gags: “Slugs stick to your ribs . . . hands, clothes, shoes, etc.” “Stuffed Slugs—a simple dish for simple people.” And not very nice jokes, since they make fun out of excessive cruelty to what are likely fairly sentient creature (there is evidence that the exchange of love darts causes palpable pain for the partners involved). But people laugh, not only because of the novelty and the grossness of the venture, but also because of their mass misapprehension of slugs.

Slugs, in a word, are generally despised. This is unfortunate, because the native species have at least as much to offer as snails in terms of charm and interest. Also, they play a vastly important role ecologically as recyclers of decaying vegetation. Indiscriminate persecution of slugs amounts to the pointless killing of beneficial organisms. (Spiders have heard it all before.)

Slugs were almost as scarce as snails in my midcontinent upbringing. But I did know what they were. Working in my grandmother’s East Denver garden, I would unearth little alien milky slugs clinging to the granite chips that formed the edges of her herbaceous borders. Picturing all slugs thus, I nearly fell off the nurse log on which I spotted my first banana slug in the rain forest of Mount Rainier National Park in 1964.

Banana slugs, commonly three to four inches long, can reach ten or even twelve inches and an inch or two in diameter—real bananalike proportions. They tend toward a yellow green with or without black spots (some populations being all black), so the name suits doubly. These magnificent animals possess sleek central ridges, pumping pneumophores that breathe air into the balloonlike lungs shared by slugs and snails, and two pairs of tentacles. The larger ones are endowed with surprisingly sophisticated eyes and olfactory organs, for perception at a distance; the shorter pair smell and feel at close range. The behavior of banana slugs involves complex responses to moisture and its absence and the ability to locate food and shelter over substantial distances. Habituation occurs: you can watch the same slug daily in the same places, season after season, year after year.

All this I watch in the wilder precincts of Swede Park, especially the alder woods where Ariolimax columbiana grazes lichens from the bark. Hibernation takes place in my outbuildings, where opalescent fecal swirls and slime tracks of past ventures decorate the walls and windowpanes, reminders of the slugs’ gentle presence.

Other native slugs occur in Willapa, notably Prophysaon andersoni. This reticulated gray slug with a sulphur-yellow margin of mantle and foot can honestly be described as pretty. In certain places we find almost wholly albino populations of this much smaller slug, the size of a pencil three-quarters used. Like certain lizards, it can dehisce its tail (which appears swollen in many individuals) under attack, hence, “taildropping slug.” P. andersoni shows a liking for wild mushrooms, especially chanterelles.

Anderson’s and banana slugs show no sign of the shell their ancestors bore. But another native, less common or better concealed, suitably known as Hemphillia camelus, retains a rudimentary external shell into which it can no more retreat than a pony into its saddle. Though apparently useless, this atavistic hump betrays the alliance of slugs and snails in the evolutionary past.

Indeed, slugs are snails. Yet while snails are venerated or at least generally liked as being “cute,” beautiful, or delectable, slugs on the whole are dismissed as disgusting and hateful. There seem to be two main reasons for this double-think. As one popular article had it, slugs “combine voracious appetites with an unprepossessing appearance, leaving behind a ravaged garden and a trail of slime.”

Well. It is true that slugs do produce mucus more generously than snails, since it serves crucial roles in locomotion, sex, defense, protection from cold, and water conservation, in the absence of a shell and operculum. But what’s so disgusting about mucus? Is it healthy to be so repelled by a vital substance of which we produce rather a lot ourselves? Perhaps this is just a symbol of the pathological repellency many people feel about parts of their own bodies. Handling slugs can be salutary in this sense.

One of the biological and mechanical wonders of slug slime is that is has to be slippery one moment, sticky the next, in order to effect the amazing sort of movement these creatures accomplish. True, it doesn’t feel very good to the touch when it goes sticky on you. But it rubs off, and you don’t have to handle slugs anyway if you don’t want to. Otherwise, the appearance of slugs can be quite engaging (for they have the same appealing “faces” as snails, especially when their tentacles are out), and their colors and shapes often seem attractive to the unjaundiced eye.

As for the other charge, it is quite true that certain slugs can devastate gardens. Our own garden testifies to the fact, nightly in season, however, the damage tends to be done in the main by two or three species of unintentionally introduced European slugs: the big, black-and-gray spotted Limax maximus; the aforementioned little milky slug, Deroceras reticulatus; and most notably, the European black or red slug, Arion ater. The last named is the grazer that gobbles gardens in a single gulp. Large (two to five inches), deeply ridged and furrowed, and colored either rust, turd-brown, or black, the suitably named A. ater’s gluttony is matched only by its fecundity. Unlike the banana slug, this species dies off each winter, but not before leaving plenty of little pearls of eggs in protected places to carry on the race for the tomatoes.

But there I go, moralizing like the rest of the slug press: there really is no gluttony about it. This is simply an animal, outside its native range through no fault or design of its own, removed from its predators and parasites, faced with an amenable habitat and abundant larder, doing what it is designed to do: you’d do the same. It is not the slugs’ fault, and it does no good to anthropomorphize them into willful villains. Still, we kill ’em, as I suppose most gardeners will—preferably with as little cruelty as possible, by freezing. It’s merely protecting our produce.

The sad and unnecessary thing is that many gardeners and others also kill banana slugs, in fact all slugs—and do so with gusto, as if out of revenge for the lettuce. And there is just no point to it. For, as I’ve said, the natives, on the whole, stay out of the garden. When they stray in, they can be removed. It just takes a modicum of discrimination and care.

Swede Park provides a perfect example plot for slug studies. What I have found over seven years here off and on is that Arion ater proliferates in the garden and lawn; Ariolimax columbiana, in the woods; and that seldom the twain shall meet. They blend only over a narrow band of rough ground at the edges. True, an especially succulent bunch of young plants sitting in a cardboard box on the back porch one rainy night did attract every species of slug on the premises, including the natives. But the instances of banana slugs or Anderson’s slugs in the garden have been relatively few. We have no battle with them. Nor, any more than for cabbage butterfly larvae, do we use any chemicals that might harm our cat, nontarget invertebrates, or ourselves: we occasionally plant dishes of beer around the periphery of the beds (death on slugs, as are the frequent beer cans in the road verges); but usually we simply pluck the caterpillars and freeze the slugs for composting, taking care to transplant the few bananas back to the banana belt.

Professor Ingrith Deyrup Olsen, a University of Washington zoologist who studies slugs, is an ardent champion of these valuable creatures. She finds them to be elegant research subjects and important elements of natural habitats, where they help to break down and recycle vast quantities of vegetation. Dr. Olsen worries about the impact of alien slugs upon the natives. Happily, at least in Willapa, I find that Arion rules the roads and yards, Ariolimax continues to prevail in the forests and woodlots, be they ever so close together. The obvious selection of disturbed lands by the black slugs and more natural by the banana closely parallels the division of resources observed by European cabbage butterflies and native veined whites. The ethnic Americans and Europeans stick to themselves, be they butterflies or slugs, along very nearly the same neighborhood bounds. Cheek by jowl, each species thrives in its chosen lands, and for the most part, only the exotics go for the gardens. But humans tend not to discriminate in their vengeance.

Too often, the popular literature doesn’t help. The slug novelty books encourage a malicious and deliberately cruel attitude. And the Washington State University Cooperative Extension Insect Awareness series publication on slug control fails to differentiate between natives and others. Photographs of A. ater and L. maximus are both labeled simply “slug,” and nothing is said about the existence of benign or beneficial slugs. Bananas surely may be called benign, even beneficial. The public should be educated to recognize these and other natives and to leave them alone.

More encouraging notes, however, begin to be heard in other quarters. A 1973 article in Pacific Search magazine, entitled “The Unendangered Slug—Ugh!” gave no strokes to native slugs, lumping them with the aliens in the nonsensical term “the slug,” a meaningless abstraction, as Stephen Jay Gould calls such “the” words. “The slug” we learn, “is one of nature’s most disliked creatures.” But ten years later, that magazine’s successor, Pacific Northwest, printed an article, with a different emphasis, entitled “The Lives of a Slug,” by Rick Gauger. Sumptuously if not diagnostically illustrated by Dugald Stermer, the piece highlighted Dr. Olsen’s work and the plight of misperceived native slugs. Banana slugs were empathetically depicted as hounded by foreign competition and domestic harassment alike. Directly confronting the earlier article, Gauger concluded that the time might come, after all, when the banana slug will be considered endangered. I don’t really believe that (unless slugs take off as less-than-fast food); but I am glad to see the popular literature on slugs take a turn toward just concern and respect.

The popular impression of slugs as detestable and disgusting makes no more sense, after all, than my former hatred of spiders. For where, after all, lies the line between obsession and contempt? In which black pit of our brains forms the nauseous root of revulsion? And whence pounces phobia, to crush the impulse of interest and goodwill and inform the consciousness instead with senseless horror and needless hate?

We know that love and hate are not so very far apart, and the ways we try to show them both can be just about the same. (Why else the love darts of the snails?) When, as a boy, I reviled spiders and their webs yet exalted snails and their shells, perhaps my childish passions sprang from the same source—and ran to equally unwholesome depths. And in the foggy bottoms of my forming mind, perhaps they nearly met and might have switched around so that spiders drew my utmost yearning and snails my sickest dread.

Maybe neither was an appropriate way to regard nature. For the boundless enthusiasm of enchanted youth just cannot be sustained, while fear and loathing never please Pan. For me, coming here, obsession and aversion collided in a land where the objects of each abound; and now I feel neither. I know that at this very moment I can take flashlight in hand and inspect an enormous apricot spider repairing her great orb web or taking her rest up inside her house of woven maple leaves; or follow the silky signature of a snail’s slime trail across the old plum glade to where the ivory foot and tentacles of a green snail may be seen in midslither over ripe plums on the damp ground, shiny shell in tow. Both visions would give me exactly the same reward—a solid sense of pleasure from beauty, fascination with form, and wonder at the elegance of evolution—as infatuation and phobia blend into equanimity toward all nature.