I set down my pen next to a slug the other day, not your garden variety, but a beast of a banana slug near the central California coast under misty morning redwoods. The slug wasn’t so much lumbering as gliding at a hardly perceptible speed over dried leaves, under twigs. Setting the pen down, I wanted it for scale.
That’s when our engagement began. Or maybe it wasn’t me being engaged with, but my proxy, evidence of me. The slug seized upon my pen, wrapping its face around the tip.
Yes, they have faces. Look for long enough, there’s no doubt. A gelatinous array of four-tentacled sensors feels the air and duff, shrinking back with every contact as if zapped with electricity, eye stalks ducking into its body. How sensitive a slug appears, you wonder if it feels more than you, its every sensation a tincture.
Observing a slug in action requires the throttle be disengaged. Get comfortable, preferably on hands and knees, your face down close. If you come in gently it won’t seem to mind or notice you’re there.
When its eye stocks stretched to their fullest extent, the slug appeared unbridled as it crossed the length of the pen, like a horse galloping into an open field, half and inch per minute at most, sometimes slowing but never quite stopping. A single hole gaped open on the right side of its mantle, an orifice called the pneumostome, which moves air in and out of the slug’s single lung. I hadn’t noticed the hole before. At this breathtaking pace, was it starting to pant?
The pen took half an hour end to end, the slug exploring its length at sensual leisure, following the chemistry of my pocket, my hand. When it wrapped around the clicker at the end, I wondered what it might write, a hello, a thank you, or something more particular, a letter from the ground, a species manifesto, the ways of its kind, how temperature, light, and chemistry are their own ways of knowing.
Was it mating with my pen?
Slugs are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning they have both a penis and a genital opening, able to fertilize each other. Their acts of intercourse are known to take hours. For a clearer picture of slug sex, Cassandra Willyard wrote an excellent summation here.
Coming back down the metal body, the slug did not err, true to the line. It was coming back for another round. Do you know I’m here? I wondered, wanting to tap its mantle, let it know I was watching. Such a human centric question. The slug could have said the same. Do you know I’m here? Do you know this pen is mine?
The smooth metal must have felt like nothing else in these woods, like gliding over a mirror or warm ice. The textured finger grip may have been like scratching an itch. In all of the branches, lichens, and rotting leaves of the forest, this may have been like finding gold, like paradise, a spot of pure pleasure. Or it was an enemy, or a possible food source, another slug. In common garden snails, sibling cannibalism has been observed among hatchlings. Banana slugs are known to rasp off another’s protuberant genital during intercourse and consume it, an act known as apophallation, the biting off of the penis.
This living, fleshy wand reached the end of the pen, and, apparently satisfied, it veered away. It’s eye stalks stretched forward in what I took to be enthusiasm, gusto, aiming for whatever is next on the forest floor.
Photos: Craig Childs
Thank you It was good to start my morning slow and at ground level. I may just stay here all day to see what I can see
You opened it to a greater world. I wonder how long such information will last in its memory? Or will it disappear immediately, leaving space for a new experience and new information?
Please report on the birth of the tiny penslugs – with photos. p.s. Remind the mother slug or pen, to breathe slowly.
This lovely slug observation reminds me of E.L. Grant Watson’s “Unknown Eros” which begins: “The three of us sat on the step outside the kitchen door and watched the hermaphrodite copulation of slugs, while the summer night grew dark, and nightingales sang from the thorn thickets, and glow-worms hung curled in dewy grass stems. First with curiosity and surprise, then with wonder, and then in an awed and fascinated silence, we watched the slow, rhythmical movements of the two creatures. They were on a thick, twisted thread of their own slime.” Not a bad way to spend some time–watching slugs. (Note: “Unknown Eros” appears in The Norton Book of Nature Writing. It also was published in a selected edition of Watson’s writing–Descent of Spirit.)