We've just found a six inch long leopard slug wandering over our living
room floor. The only way, we think, that it could have got so far into
the house was up through the floorboards! At least it was heading for
the kitchen door and out into the garden. Keith picked it up in a bit
of kitchen roll (yuck), and popped it out onto the far side of the
garden, well away from our plants. Is this a record for a slug found
indoors?

--
Susie Thompson, Isle of Arran
SPAM BLOCK IN OPERATION! Replace "deadspam.com" with "arrandragons.co.uk" to
reply by e-mail.

"SusieThompson" wrote in message
...
We've just found a six inch long leopard slug wandering over our living
room floor. The only way, we think, that it could have got so far into
the house was up through the floorboards! At least it was heading for
the kitchen door and out into the garden. Keith picked it up in a bit
of kitchen roll (yuck), and popped it out onto the far side of the
garden, well away from our plants. Is this a record for a slug found
indoors?

Nah, my ex wife was about 5' 4", thats the biggest slug i've ever seen
indoors !

Dr. HackenSack wrote:

Nah, my ex wife was about 5' 4", thats the biggest slug i've ever seen
indoors !


OOOOOH is you crusin' for a brusin'

"Essjay001" wrote in message
...
Dr. HackenSack wrote:

Nah, my ex wife was about 5' 4", thats the biggest slug i've ever seen
indoors !


OOOOOH is you crusin' for a brusin'

I did say "Ex" !

In article , SusieThompson
writes
We've just found a six inch long leopard slug wandering over our living
room floor. The only way, we think, that it could have got so far into
the house was up through the floorboards! At least it was heading for
the kitchen door and out into the garden. Keith picked it up in a bit
of kitchen roll (yuck), and popped it out onto the far side of the
garden, well away from our plants. Is this a record for a slug found
indoors?

I used to live in a Victorian cottage built into the hillside. The
lowest floor opened on to the garden, but its back wall was into the
hillside, and a layer of plaster applied directly to the cut away soil.
The floor was of bricks laid directly on the earth. (This was our living
room and kitchen, btw). You can imagine how many invertebrate visitors
we use to have!
--
Kay Easton

Edward's earthworm page:
http://www.scarboro.demon.co.uk/edward/index.htm

In article , SusieThompson
writes
We've just found a six inch long leopard slug wandering over our living
room floor. The only way, we think, that it could have got so far into
the house was up through the floorboards! At least it was heading for
the kitchen door and out into the garden. Keith picked it up in a bit
of kitchen roll (yuck), and popped it out onto the far side of the
garden, well away from our plants. Is this a record for a slug found
indoors?

Phone the Guinness Book of Records and ask them :-)

The other common way for slugs to come into houses is in soil of plants
in pots or on the plants themselves, and of course on lettuces, though
they would be *mostly* smaller ones!

It's odd, isn't it, that we find slimy things a cause for "yuck". I have
no phobias involving wildlife but I still prefer not to pick slugs up in
my bare fingers.

--
Malcolm

"Dr. HackenSack" wrote in message
news:53VFa.9063 OOOOOH is you crusin' for a brusin'

I did say "Ex" !



Ah! I missed that.

The message
from SusieThompson contains these words:

We've just found a six inch long leopard slug wandering over our living
room floor. The only way, we think, that it could have got so far into
the house was up through the floorboards! At least it was heading for
the kitchen door and out into the garden. Keith picked it up in a bit
of kitchen roll (yuck), and popped it out onto the far side of the
garden, well away from our plants. Is this a record for a slug found
indoors?

No :-(. At our last house I once found a huge pair having intimate
relations half way up the sitting room wall, in winter. They can easily
get into old stone houses in rural west Scotland, which often have
little or no below-ground foundations and just raw earth beneath the
floorboards. There are often gaps in the walls' mortar where slugs can
hide. If your dog leaves any trace of food in its dish overnight, you'll
probably find some slime trails around it; or if you have a sack of dog
food indoors that's another likely slughome.

Janet.

On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 23:06:54 +0100, "Dr. HackenSack"
wrote:


"SusieThompson" wrote in message
. ..
We've just found a six inch long leopard slug wandering over our living
room floor. The only way, we think, that it could have got so far into
the house was up through the floorboards! At least it was heading for
the kitchen door and out into the garden. Keith picked it up in a bit
of kitchen roll (yuck), and popped it out onto the far side of the
garden, well away from our plants. Is this a record for a slug found
indoors?

Nah, my ex wife was about 5' 4", thats the biggest slug i've ever seen
indoors !


Should have got some bait methinks. 8-)

On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 23:51:47 +0100, Janet Baraclough
wrote:

The message
from SusieThompson contains these words:

We've just found a six inch long leopard slug wandering over our living
room floor. The only way, we think, that it could have got so far into
the house was up through the floorboards! At least it was heading for
the kitchen door and out into the garden. Keith picked it up in a bit
of kitchen roll (yuck), and popped it out onto the far side of the
garden, well away from our plants. Is this a record for a slug found
indoors?

No :-(. At our last house I once found a huge pair having intimate
relations half way up the sitting room wall, in winter. They can easily
get into old stone houses in rural west Scotland, which often have
little or no below-ground foundations and just raw earth beneath the
floorboards. There are often gaps in the walls' mortar where slugs can
hide. If your dog leaves any trace of food in its dish overnight, you'll
probably find some slime trails around it; or if you have a sack of dog
food indoors that's another likely slughome.
Janet.

There was an interesting, if yucky, article a year or so ago in New
Scientist magazine, about an Austrailian (I think) biologost who used
diferent species of slugs in his bathroom to keep the mould and rot away.
They'd come out at night, eat all the mould in the shower and then retreat
into holes and cracks in time for his family's daily routine. I don't think
his wife was too happy though. Apparently it seemd to work quite well.

Ah I found it.
http://archive.newscientist.com/secu...mg16722494.600



Tim.

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:32:16 +0200, Tim
wrote:

On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 23:51:47 +0100, Janet Baraclough
wrote:

The message
from SusieThompson contains these words:

We've just found a six inch long leopard slug wandering over our living
room floor. The only way, we think, that it could have got so far into
the house was up through the floorboards! At least it was heading for
the kitchen door and out into the garden. Keith picked it up in a bit
of kitchen roll (yuck), and popped it out onto the far side of the
garden, well away from our plants. Is this a record for a slug found
indoors?

No :-(. At our last house I once found a huge pair having intimate
relations half way up the sitting room wall, in winter. They can easily
get into old stone houses in rural west Scotland, which often have
little or no below-ground foundations and just raw earth beneath the
floorboards. There are often gaps in the walls' mortar where slugs can
hide. If your dog leaves any trace of food in its dish overnight, you'll
probably find some slime trails around it; or if you have a sack of dog
food indoors that's another likely slughome.
Janet.

There was an interesting, if yucky, article a year or so ago in New
Scientist magazine, about an Austrailian (I think) biologost who used
diferent species of slugs in his bathroom to keep the mould and rot away.
They'd come out at night, eat all the mould in the shower and then retreat
into holes and cracks in time for his family's daily routine. I don't think
his wife was too happy though. Apparently it seemd to work quite well.

our night slugs live on our cats' food.

Ah I found it.
http://archive.newscientist.com/secu...mg16722494.600



Tim.

--
martin

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:32:16 +0200, Tim
wrote:

There was an interesting, if yucky, article a year or so ago in New
Scientist magazine, about an Austrailian (I think) biologost who used
diferent species of slugs in his bathroom to keep the mould and rot away.
They'd come out at night, eat all the mould in the shower and then retreat
into holes and cracks in time for his family's daily routine. I don't think
his wife was too happy though. Apparently it seemd to work quite well.

Ah I found it.
http://archive.newscientist.com/secu...mg16722494.600

Access only seems to be available to New Scientist subscribers.
--
martin

In article oprqo272jzwxhha1@localhost, Tim timnothy.cohsalpleangmer@a
pk.at writes

There was an interesting, if yucky, article a year or so ago in New
Scientist magazine, about an Austrailian (I think) biologost who used
diferent species of slugs in his bathroom to keep the mould and rot away.
They'd come out at night, eat all the mould in the shower and then retreat
into holes and cracks in time for his family's daily routine. I don't think
his wife was too happy though. Apparently it seemd to work quite well.

Ah I found it.
http://archive.newscientist.com/secu...=mg16722494.60
0

The best one, IIRC, was that beautiful yellow and grey one that we have.
We tried importing one into our shower, but he didn't like it, so we
took him back outside again. I don't think we had anywhere damp enough
for him to hang out in the day.
--
Kay Easton

Edward's earthworm page:
http://www.scarboro.demon.co.uk/edward/index.htm

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:44:08 +0200, martin wrote:

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:32:16 +0200, Tim
wrote:

There was an interesting, if yucky, article a year or so ago in New
Scientist magazine, about an Austrailian (I think) biologost who used
diferent species of slugs in his bathroom to keep the mould and rot
away. They'd come out at night, eat all the mould in the shower and then
retreat into holes and cracks in time for his family's daily routine. I
don't think his wife was too happy though. Apparently it seemd to work
quite well.

Ah I found it.
http://archive.newscientist.com/secu...mg16722494.600




Access only seems to be available to New Scientist subscribers.
-- martin


Ah, sorry,it's in the archives, and I didn't realise. Here it is in full,
it's a bit long.

Magazine section:Â*Features
Good house-keeping New Scientist vol 167 issue 2249 - 29Â*JulyÂ*2000, page 34
Â*

Hate housework? Can't find a reliable cleaner? Try a slug Â*

IT WASN'T just the pink-and-grey colour scheme. Or even the loose tiles.
The thing that Martyn Robinson hated most about his bathroom was the mould.
Dark spots speckled the grout and a fuzzy, grey film clung to the shower
curtain. No sooner had he scrubbed it off, back it came. "It was Mould
City," says Robinson, a naturalist at the Australian Museum in Sydney.

Hardly surprising, really. Robinson and his partner Lynne McNairn had
chosen to live in an old, two-storey, brick-and-fibro house in Narraweena,
a soggy suburb to the north of Sydney. The bedrock is so close to the
surface that when it rains, water oozes out of the ground and turns the
garden into a bog. Damp comes with the territory, and in a poorly
ventilated bathroom, mould was inevitable. It was one long battle against
the fuzzy fungus until, one day, Robinson decided to take on domestic help.
He started with one, then three, and eventually a whole army of cleaners.
They were small, cost only bed and board, and didn't use nasty chemicals
around the house. They were slugs: a motley crew of striped ones, red ones
and big, fat grey ones.

As a naturalist, Robinson is keen to experiment with biological controls of
all sorts. Since he settled in Narraweena, he has offered houseroom to a
whole menagerie of creatures in return for their doing a few chores. His
ultimate aim is to build up a trouble-free staff of animals that can be
left alone to get on with the job. Already, he has turned up previously
hidden talents among some of the local fauna.

The slugs were his first employees. "Some slugs love mould. They thrive on
it," says Robinson. "I noticed a few came into the house and headed for the
bathroom. A friend of mine had seen slugs eating mould in his house so I
thought I'd test it out." Worried that the molluscs would never make it
across the vast expanse of carpet that lay between them and the bathroom,
he gathered them up and carried them to their new home. "Lo and behold, it
worked. They kept the mould down. They didn't get rid of it completely but
we only needed to do a little work. They are particularly good at cleaning
grout, silicone sealer and other hard-to-reach places," he says.

Slugs have a strong homing instinct, foraging in the damp night air and
spending the deadly desiccating daylight hours in a cool, moist retreat.
Robinson provided his new staff with comfortable lodgings in the shape of a
little ceramic pot perforated with stars and crescent moons—the sort more
usually used to waft perfumed oils around the place. "They soon learnt that
was home," he says. Each night, the slugs crawled out of the moons and
stars and slithered off on their fungal foray. At daybreak, they crept home
where they were safe from bare feet and torrents of hot water. In the
breeding season, the slugs took a break from housework, heading down the
drain and out of the vent pipe to seek a mate in the garden. After a brief
romantic interlude, some came back, unable to resist Robinson's
increasingly furry shower curtain. Those that failed to return were
replaced with new recruits from the garden.

Since he took on his first few slugs, Robinson has tried out several
species, hoping to find the perfect home help. The leopard slug is a good
mould-grazer, but tends to slip out of the bathroom at night to explore the
house. "You might step on it during its nightly wanderings, so it wasn't
ideal," says Robinson. The little striped slug—not so little at 3 to 5
centimetres long—was better. It has a healthy appetite for mould and goes
about the job as energetically as a slug can. The red triangle slug, which
can grow up to 10 centimetres, was a bit too picky. "It will eat mould but
it won't go on the ground. It's good for shower curtains but won't clean
the other parts of the bathroom." The best slug for the job turned out to
be Limax flava, the much-maligned great grey slug familiar in European
gardens and introduced to Australia. L. flava is a big, beefy slug, 9
centimetres at full stretch, so it eats a lot of mould. But it's also
pretty sluggish, for want of a better word, and doesn't wander far at
night, so there's little risk of finding one squashed into the carpet the
next morning.

At one point, great greys, stripys and a young red triangle shared the
workload and Robinson was more than happy with their efforts. They were
efficient and didn't stain the carpets as cleaning with bleach did.
Eventually, though, it was time for a new bathroom: that pink-and-grey just
had to go. Freshly plumbed and neatly tiled in green and white, the new
bathroom is airy and bright. The old plastic shower curtain has gone,
replaced by a shiny, glass cubicle. "We do have a silicone strip around the
shower tray which is hard to clean and the slugs do that brilliantly," says
Robinson.

Even so, redundancies loomed. It was time to downsize the staff. The
celestial slug house has gone, and the slimmed-down workforce consists of
three small stripy slugs. "They are small enough to fit in the groove of
the sliding door without getting squashed," says Robinson. "Occasionally
they get fed up and crawl down the plughole, but generally they do a good
job."

Robinson has been well and truly bitten by the slug bug and hopes other
people will give them a try. "It's an alternative for those who can't be
bothered scrubbing or who don't like chemicals," he says. "They don't
remove all the mould, but they do keep it down to an acceptable level." For
those who don't fancy the sight of fat grey slugs in the bath, he is
working on a range of designer slugs in fetching bathroom colours. L. flava
varies naturally from grey to yellow, and also comes in albino. "The yellow
form is quite attractive," says Robinson. "And the white ones can be tinted
by feeding them vegetable dyes—although you have to keep this up or they
revert to white again."

Apart from the odd silvery trail up the bathroom wall and a few droppings
that are easily swilled away during the morning shower, slugs don't have
any real drawbacks—unless you collect vintage wines. "They like the mouldy
labels," warns Robinson. "They eat them, and then you don't know what's in
the bottle."

With Sydney's warm, damp climate—and especially on Robinson's boggy patch
of land—there's plenty of work for a large household staff. Keeping down
cockroaches, for instance. Roaches come in all sizes, from the thumb-sized
Periplaneta species to the smaller but more persistent Blattella germanica.
"They're a problem—for other people," says Robinson. His house is so well
protected, he sees about one cockroach a month. The first line of defence
is a colony of leaf-tailed geckos—prickly-looking lizards with flat, leaf-
shaped tails. These particular geckos don't have sticky feet and can only
cling by their claws to rough surfaces. They live outside on the brickwork,
where they are active at night. "They form a sort of moat of geckos that
insects have to get past before they can make it into the house," says
Robinson.

Any that do get in risk an encounter with the "lounge lizards", secretive
skinks that skulk by day behind the lounge (that's a sofa to non-Australian
speakers). The skinks emerge in the evening to hunt a whole range of
unwelcome guests, including cockroaches, spiders and silverfish. "You
hardly notice they are there. But they'll eat anything that's moving on the
ground," says Robinson.

Cockroaches might be unpleasant, but termites are a householder's worst
nightmare. Given half a chance, they'll eat the house—unless something eats
them first. In Narraweena, termites have a natural enemy in the little
black ant. If the ants come across a band of termite workers, they'll
follow them down into their galleries where they'll eat termites at every
stage of development from egg to adult. Above ground, any termite king or
queen setting out to found a new nest is fair game. If they land anywhere
near the ants they're done for—and that's one fewer nest to worry about.
Robinson and McNairn are happy to share their home with a few black ants in
exchange for a termite-free house, although the ants themselves can become
a nuisance. "They'll eat our food too—from the sugar to breakfast
cereals—and they get everywhere. You might find them living in the teapot,
for instance. But we tolerate them. They patrol the places a human cleaner
can't get to," says Robinson.

Scuttling insects and stationary eggs are relatively easy to deal with, but
in Australia it's hard to avoid flying insects, especially mosquitoes. Most
people keep them out with wire screens. Robinson's insect screens are woven
from silk and tailor-made by orb spiders. Webs on either side of the ramp
leading to the first-floor entrance create an insect-screened corridor to
the house. Golden orb spiders are best for this job. They build fairly
permanent webs, and although they don't always build them in the right
place or at the right angle, the webs can be moved into position by
carefully detaching the supporting strands and fastening them to a more
suitable twig or stem. Garden orb spiders do their bit too, but they have a
serious drawback—they build a new web each night, eating the old one the
following morning. "This means we sometimes walk straight into a web at
night that wasn't there during the day," says Robinson.

There are plenty of pests left to keep a whole range of wildlife fed, from
dragonflies to bats, to fish and frogs which live in the garden's pools and
ponds, even insect-eating sundews and pitcher plants, which thrive on the
boggy ground. And about this time of year, the anti-mosquito task force is
swelled by the arrival of several species of Toxorhynchites—unusually large
mosquitoes with glittering iridescent bodies and wings. There are dozens of
species of Toxorhynchites around the world and they share one endearing
habit: as larvae they have a voracious appetite for the young of other
mosquitoes. The adult insects suck plant sap and nectar, not blood, and
they lay their eggs in small pools, containers filled with rainwater, tree
holes and even waterlogged footprints in the lawn. The offspring of other
mosquitoes don't have much of a chance. A single Toxorhynchites larva can
eat its way through 400 smaller mosquito larvae before it reaches
adulthood. "Although we've still got plenty of mosquitoes, there are fewer
than there might have been," says Robinson.

Apart from their battery of biological controls, Robinson and McNairn
restrict their fight against pests to mechanical methods—squashing snails,
for instance—or at most, sloshing ecologically friendly soapy water over
bad infestations of scale insects. The result is a garden filled with
native species, from mud-burrowing spiny crayfish to seven species of
insect-eating lizard. Native honeybees, rescued from a fallen tree, nest in
two hives that Robinson has provided, each potentially giving him a litre
of lemony-tasting honey a year. Native wasps have moved into other
artificial nest sites—and keep down harmful caterpillars. "We provide what
the animals want, and they come," says Robinson. "And the more diversity
there is, the less likely we are to have pests. Pests may get used to
chemicals, but they never get used to being eaten."

And there's a bonus. There's always a ready supply of new additions to the
household staff. "We'll probably never have a scrupulously clean and tidy
house but we have one that's comfortable, entertaining and doesn't give us
too much work."

For anyone thinking of following Robinson's example, it's probably best to
check that it's OK with any other humans living in the house. Fortunately,
McNairn shares Robinson's enthusiasm. "I like having the critters around,"
she says. "They make our life interesting, and generally you don't even
know they are there. They just quietly get on with their jobs and every now
and then you see one of the geckos or slugs and think, that's nice, they're
still here."

Unless they are spiders, that is. "There was a bit of a problem when a
large banded huntsman spider I'd introduced to the garden took up residence
in a drawer," admits Robinson. "When Lynne went to take out her favourite
grey jumper, part of it moved under her hand," he recalls. Her piercing
scream persuaded him to put the spider at the farthest part of the garden.
"It never returned," he says, "probably because its sound receptors are
still ringing."

Stephanie Pain

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 10:29:41 +0200, Tim
wrote:

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:44:08 +0200, martin wrote:

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 09:32:16 +0200, Tim
wrote:

There was an interesting, if yucky, article a year or so ago in New
Scientist magazine, about an Austrailian (I think) biologost who used
diferent species of slugs in his bathroom to keep the mould and rot
away. They'd come out at night, eat all the mould in the shower and then
retreat into holes and cracks in time for his family's daily routine. I
don't think his wife was too happy though. Apparently it seemd to work
quite well.

Ah I found it.
http://archive.newscientist.com/secu...mg16722494.600




Access only seems to be available to New Scientist subscribers.
-- martin


Ah, sorry,it's in the archives, and I didn't realise. Here it is in full,
it's a bit long.

Thanks. Of course he could have avoided mould by improving the
ventillation in his bathroom. :-)
--
martin