Seek and ye shall find

Before Christmas I was invited to speak at one of the monthly public talks hosted by the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. I’m always happy to be asked to speak to students or the public, so my default answer to these requests is “Yes!” Usually for this kind of presentation I get to choose the topic, but this time my name came up because one of the Seymour Center staffers came up with “bees, banana slugs, and bat stars” so that’s what I was given to work with. When my brain took hold of this topic and these very disparate animals, the common theme that came to mind was . . . wait for it . . . reproduction. So yes, this is going to be another sex talk.

What this means is that I need to provide some information on the talk and photos so that the Seymour Center can start publicizing the event, which is in March. Banana slugs are still in the mix, and I don’t have any pictures of them, so this afternoon I took advantage of a break between storms to go hiking in the forest and look for slugs. I’d been feeling a little cabin fever for the past few days because of the rain and my own recovery from bronchitis which sapped all of my energy, so I was grateful for an excuse to leave my desk and get outside for a bit.

I headed out to the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, knowing that where there are redwood trees there should also be banana slugs, especially after all the rain we’ve had recently. You know how when you’re looking for something you can’t find it, and when you’re not looking for it you see them all over the place? That’s how this hike began. It turns out that looking for banana slugs under a deadline makes them very hard to find. And I did have a deadline, as I’d promised to have the blurb and photos for my talk ready today.

After about half an hour of slowly meandering along the trails and getting distracted by all the fungi that popped up after the rains, I did see a banana slug:

That is such a gastropod face! Banana slugs are really cool (and ectothermic, too) animals. One of my buddies in grad school kept one for a pet in our office bullpen; we called it Terry, because slugs are hermaphrodites and deserve androgynous names. Terry really liked eating mushrooms and lettuce.

Banana slugs, and all of the terrestrial snails and slugs, are pulmonate (“lung”) gastropods. Most of their marine relatives, with whom I spend so much quality time in the lab and in the field, are prosobranch (“gill in front”) gastropods. The nudibranchs and sea hares, which are so photogenic and conspicuous, are opisthobranch (“gill on back”) gastropods. As these names imply, the prosobranchs and opisthobranchs possess gills (although they are very different kinds of gills) and thus live in water. The pulmonates don’t have gills; they live on land and breathe air. [There are aquatic pulmonates, too. Only a few are marine, and most live in fresh water. They have to come to the surface to breathe.]

So, what is the lung of a banana slug? It’s actually the mantle cavity, that oh-so-molluscan feature, that in prosobranchs contains the gill(s). In the pulmonates, the mantle cavity is highly vascularized, as you’d expect from any gas-exchange surface, and opens to the outside by a hole called a pneumostome.

Here’s the pneumostome of my first banana slug of the afternoon:

The pneumostome is always on the right side of the animal’s mantle. You can actually watch it open and close as the slug breathes.

I found a second slug about an hour into the hike.

See? No pneumostome on the left side.

If I’d had the time, I would have put the slugs together to see if they’d mate. It is a sex talk I’m prepping for, after all. Heck, what would be even better would be to find two slugs already in copulo. No such luck today, though. What’s good about not finding everything that I was looking for today is that it gives me incentive to keep going out to search for it. And in the meantime, I’ve got to start studying up on local fungi. I saw so many different kinds of mushrooms today that now I’m motivated to fill in this particular gap in my knowledge. Might as well take advantage of the El Niño rains, right?