Slugs passively pick up moss fragments in their slime as they travel

Evidence

So on misty mornings Craig and I went slug hunting. Every time we found a slug, we would gently pick it up and touch its belly to a clean glass microscope slide, like a round inky thumb pressed to a fingerprint card. Then we put the surprised slugs right back where we found them and after a moment of playing dead they continued their slow progress across the moss. With the care of detectives fingerprinting a subject, we carefully brought our slug prints back to the lab and under the microscope we checked the slime for the presence of moss propagules. Sure enough, caught in the sticky film were fragments of green. Perhaps we were on to something. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 375

Categorization

• XREF: The slug-fingerprint method is a gem of improvised field technique worth setting beside the tracer-bead and search-image methods in earlier chapters — a running motif of craft in observation. — connects to: Chipmunk foot traffic both creates the gaps and disperses the moss that colonizes them — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 380; Invertebrates act as unwitting couriers of moss sperm beyond water’s reach — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 265; Harvested moss carries whole untold communities of invertebrates to their death — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 608
• SEED: A teaching example of creative hypothesis-testing: ‘fingerprinting’ an animal to see what it carries — usable in a nature-interpretation methods session.

Broader Connections

• Invertebrates act as unwitting couriers of moss sperm beyond water’s reach #expands (0.85) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 265