A friend sent me a series of text messages last night. He was spotlighting for wolf spiders on remnant grassland in Melbourne's west but was having no luck. What the area lacked in lycosids it made up with vertebrates. The first message mentioned a striped legless lizard (Delma impar). The next few, owls and nightjars.
So I went out into the back garden (which is overrun with wolf spiders) and did some spotlighting of my own. Never mind that I didn't have a spot light. A minor detail. I was on a mission to locate and identify leopard slugs and picking them up by the glint of mucus in moonlight would have to do.
I saw the first slug on the compost heap but its head and part of the mantle were buried in cereal. I photographed it for the record and then moved on. The second was in the bird bath (above). This one had clear and distinctive markings. The configuration of black dots at the posterior margin of the mantle matched those of a slug I'd photographed the night before (below). I'm pretty sure that the same slug was back for its evening paddle.
But the slug was showing signs of having recently indulged in more than a paddle. That pale projection on the right side of its head is its penis in the last stages of retraction. (No wonder the birds give the bath a miss.)
And then I noticed a couple more leopard slugs. They didn’t bother to climb up a tall object but engaged in their mid-air activity* from the rim of a plant pot.
The pictures tell the story. (I just wish the slugs had done it against a better backdrop than mulch made from old copies of the Age.)
* I've named them Ralph and Lisa.