Video: Slugs should be so much cooler to watch. They have antennae that wriggle around and their method of forward motion is weird. But they are just so damn slow. You feel the slug’s pain and respect its patience but you don’t really want to look very long. Whether it’s moving at 20x or 40x, timelapse is truly the way to watch a slug do its thing.
During the day, Karl Johanson works at Neo-opsis, a science fiction magazine. But when he’s on Johanson time, the man does us all a favour and films a Banana Slug slowly making its way across his house.
According to Karl, that gross stuff on its tail is just dirt and fir needles that got stuck to its slime.
All this slug talk reminds me of a defence of the strange molluscs by the retired biologist Bill Amos. In the midst of a lot of interesting trivia, Amos suggests:
In a dark room, place a strong light behind a slug so that you can see through its translucent skin. You’ll see a three-chambered heart pumping vigorously as blood moves through vessels that empty into spacious cavities; there is no closed capillary network as found in vertebrates.
Alright, that would be a cool video. Maybe timelapse isn’t the only way to watch a slug.