Recent Patterns

[Tim Smith]

Last nite when doing BMI sampling from a small river I caught a regular old yellow garden slug in the second sample. This might not have been overly suprising to me earier in the year or at a differnent sample site where I ould have just chalked it up to it getting knocked off the over hanging bushes.
but this survey site is in the middle of a long run with no over hangng bushes for 100 feet up river and secondly everything is still covered in 6 inches of snow.
Is it possible for a garden slug to live under water?
has anyone else seen anything like that before?
thanks
-T

[skeet3t]

Slugs down around here are a brown-grey color. Did your critter have the prominent antennae? We have the larva of the cranefly that looks like a slug.

[Tim Smith]

it had the eye stalks and a mouth the book had for a slug and was identical to the yellow slugs i get in my garden. we have some grey ones here too, but they are smaller than the yellow ones.
We got a alot of cranefly larva in the samples too. they are really neat looking under a disecting scope.

[Joe Hard]

I have seen slugs in lakes, and have seen them in rivers.
Two years ago I had a zodiak,fish hunter,(inflatable raft)I took it from the car blew it up with a pump.put in the water and went out onto a large pond. I anchored the raft and while I was casting arround for bass,my fishing partner was bait fishing. A stong wind came, I hit her in the head with a large conehead marabou muddler.She was pissed.
I looked and a slug made its way from below the raft and was workin its way toward her.She did not like that either.
Your guess is good as mine where it came from.it was not on the raft when we assembled it.it was hot and no slugs were around we looked.

[Airhead]

If you had Cranefly larva in the sample, you must have had a high water event, as they are terrestrial larvae that burrow in the streambanks. It wouldn't surprise me if the slug was washed from the same moist streambank as the Cranefly larvae.

Another possibility is that a person or animal broke up soil crossing the river upstream, or maybe erosion dumped a slide in.

[Taxon]