MOLLUSCS

After a dry spell molluscs (slugs and snails) are delighted 

with the wet conditions following a rain shower. 

This slug (Arion ater rufus) is the orange version of the Great BLACK Slug (Arion ater).  It is one of the larger slugs found in Britain but is not the one that eats your choice garden plants.  It prefers dead plant or animal material and fungi.

Like all slugs and snails it has four tentacles or 'horns'.  The two larger ones are for sight, though molluscs can only distinguish light and dark.  The smaller pair, lower down are for tasting smelling or feeling.  If touched, molluscs will retract their tentacles, and if really upset they will contract to make themselves shorter and fatter.

  

The troublesome ones are small and black or beige. They're often hard to see.  This little blighter looks like  a small blob of dirt until you get close and see how he has been chomping away on an apple.

  

Snails are slightly more popular than slugs, - at least with children.  They have shells of course, while slugs just have a leathery oval at the front end called a mantle. 

SHELL SHOCK

Here we have the Common or Garden Snail with a youngster of a different species.

Snails too have four tentacles and in the image below you can just make out the 'eyes' at the ends of the longer tentacles.

Even these little Banded Snails have tentacles.  The one on the left was very shy.

This species (Cepea nemoralis) also known as the Brown-lipped Snail is very varied in colour: you may find yellow or orange individuals without any stripes and the stripy ones may have a few or a lot of stripes.

There are 90+ species of land snails in the UK and 30+ species of slugs.  They occupy an important niche, providing food for hedgehogs, thrushes and glow-worms, to name a few, and they also have an important composting role, recycling any dead material.