Another slow morning for snail picking.
It was cold and dry, so most of the gastropods were probably hunkered down wherever it is they hunker down.
I’m hopeful, however, that after yesterday’s significant weed-clearing operation there are fewer slug and snail safe-houses.
While I wasn’t picking handfuls of gastropods, I was clearing a few more weeds and setting up some “safe”-houses of my own. The hardware store didn’t have unglazed tiles, so we ended up getting unglazed terra cotta saucers to balance on bricks as nice, moist shelters from the sun and wind. At the moment, there are six of these shelters positioned around the yard. We’ll see how well they work.
Today’s take: one slug and five snails (four of which were so tiny that they almost looked like seeds).
This is evidence your selection for speed is working. The current generation is much faster. Now, when they hear/feel/see/smell you approaching, they slime off at high speed back to their secret bases, instead of waiting for you to bathe them.
Since you aren’t seeing them takeoff and buzzing away, that suggests your selection for flying isn’t have as much success. Or that they’ve developed a cloaking device.
The small size of the snails suggests you need to fine-tune your selection for large heavy nasty gastropods. Instead of evolving into something too big and mean to lift, they’ve decided to go for too small to see. An alternative is those were just decoys to lead you away from a secret base.
I definitely like the idea of providing convenient “safe” houses for them….
It’s easier than fitting radio transmitters so you can track them to their current dry-day bunkers (though have you dug around in the nearby area? I’m no gastropod expert, but someone who is should be able to tell you how far they’ll travel).
BTW, a neighbor recently told me a story that reminds us why using poison isn’t a good idea — they have a little Scottie terrier who one day started vomiting blue everywhere. Turns out for some reason he decided to start eating a bunch of slugs who had, in turn, been eating the slugbait. Normally dogs don’t eat slugs, but for some reason the poisoned slugs were suddenly interesting… huh.
He did survive, fortunately; he’s proven improbably durable a number of times (starting with a kick in the head from a horse when he was a puppy…).