Sunday 12 August 2012

But is it art? II




Any idea what this is on my garden fence?  The drunken daubings of a novice graffiti artist, perhaps?  Amazingly, and I hope you won't feel repulsed at this (I'm having a nature-geek moment), but it's the trail of dried slime left there by some slugs who have clearly been getting frisky during the night.  I know... the words 'frisky' and 'slug' don't really go together, perhaps I should have said 'horny'? - but that doesn't sound quite right either...

The great grey/leopard slug (Limax Maximus) has quite a spectacular and complex mating ritual which involves much, well, I suppose you'd call it foreplay, as these humble but apparently very well-endowed hermaphrodites slowly circle and lick eachother for hours before doing the deed, closely entwined and suspended from a trail of slime (I wish there was a better word for that).

Catching the light in the way you can perhaps see it here, this evidence of their nocturnal dance is full of beautiful rainbow colours, like the surface of a pool of oil.  In fact, now dry and completely unslimy, it resembles a fine layer of mother-of-pearl.   They might have made a mess of the fence but I can't help but see pictures in it and appropriately enough, perhaps, they seem a bit saucy to me.  I bet you'll never look at a slug in quite the same way again.








7 comments:

  1. It's a testiment to the humongous slug population in our yard that I immediately knew what it was. They leave clear but shiney works of a similar nature on our porch and drive.

    Any excuse for Echo and the Bunnymen will do.

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    1. It was the size (and height) of this particular 'work' that astounded me! It's several inches across, I'd never seen anything like this one before. What gets me too are those perfect little crescent-shaped trails at the top right. I thought someone had been doing a bit of life drawing with some pearly nail varnish!

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  2. I've continued to look at it (I'm having similar issues with a photograph that I've been trying to get a post together for)...it's beautiful. There's no doubt about it but, the longer I look at the more I see human body parts and am reminded of ancient graffiti.

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  3. Lick each other for hours! There are times our mating rituals don't seem adequate really :-D

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    1. :-) and it makes me laugh that it should be the humble and much-maligned slug, of all things, that enjoys such sensual pleasures!

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