Blog For Slimey Boys

🐌🐌I found a good sluggy boy!!🐌🐌

Sluggy Boy was outside my house last night so he came inside for a visit and we sent him on his way with a carrot slice for the long walk home.

This little dollop of ectoplasm is the Ghost Slug (Selenochlamys ysbryda), a monstrous creature that was surely never meant to see the light of day.

It’s as pale as a cave-dweller and completely eyeless. It spends most of its time burrowing up to a metre underground, where it devours earthworms in scenes of sickening brutality, slime, and deceptively large mouths.

And yet, see the light of day it did. In Wales. Which was surprising because it turned out to belong to a family that was only ever found in Turkey and Iran.

Just goes to show you never know what creatures of eternal darkness may lie just beneath your feet…

Collected from the Egyptian desert in March of 1846, the Helix desertorum specimen was sent to the British Museum, where scientists thought it had expired in transit. It was glued to a cardboard display card shortly after.

One day four years later, curators noticed something strange about their catatonic mollusk: the shell seemed to have moved from its glued position and a trail of discoloration followed it.

Archivists removed it from the card to give it a bath, with a suspicion the snail might have in fact been slumbering.

After just a few minutes of exposure to moisture, the snail’s head poked from its shell and surveyed its new home with four eye stalks.

As the snail adjusted to active life again, it became a minor celebrity and sat for a portrait by the museum’s zoological artist for inclusion in a book on mollusks, seen below: