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If you want to get an unusual pet, try to find a slug on the street and take it into your home as a pet. Slugs are easy to care for and can be fun pets for both kids and adults. In addition, it teaches children to be responsible. Slugs can be bred in an aquarium. They feed on plants, including fruits and vegetables. Keep in mind that slugs are very sensitive to various chemicals, so keep them away from products such as hairspray and even tap water. Slugs can live from one to five years.

Steps

1 Set up a pet environment

1. 1 Find the right container. Usually slugs do well in regular aquariums. The aquarium should be approximately 20 by 20 centimeters (no less). It can be bought at a pet store or ordered online.
   • Be sure to pre-ventilate the aquarium. The lid must have holes for ventilation. For example, something like a fine mesh works great.
   • Slugs are very small, especially compared to the reptiles that are also commonly kept in aquariums. Look closely at the vents and make sure the slug doesn't escape through them.
2. 2 Pour filler into the aquarium. The best filler is ordinary soil, grass, leaves and the like. If you find a slug on the street, it is best to take soil, leaves and grass from the exact area where you found the animal. Be sure to sift the soil before adding it to the aquarium so that no objects dangerous to the slug get there along with the earth.
   • Once a week, remove the slug from the tank, transfer it to another container (also with holes!) Remove the old filler and replace it with a new one.
3. 3 Buy various items for the aquarium. Slugs will love items such as various artificial plants and leaves. In addition, do not forget to bring real leaves, twigs and other objects from the street that a slug can climb on.
   • If you bring something from the street, be sure to inspect the item carefully before placing it in the aquarium.
4. 4 Clean your aquarium regularly. Once every three months, arrange a general cleaning in the aquarium: wash all the walls and bottom of the aquarium and replace the filler. Rinse twigs and other items in the aquarium in water, then allow them to air dry. If the twigs immediately become damp and soft due to the water, replace them with new twigs.
   • Slugs are very sensitive to chemicals. Therefore, do not wash the aquarium with soap! Wash the aquarium and items in it with warm water only.
   • Slugs are very sensitive to ordinary tap water, so you should choose distilled water for them.

2 What to feed a slug

1. 1 Wash vegetables and fruits. Slugs are very fond of plants. For example, you can give the slug the leftover fruits and vegetables from your table. You can give him fresh fruits and vegetables, but first they need to be washed in distilled water. Before you feed the slug, it's important to eliminate traces of pesticides on the fruit.
   • If possible, choose fresh fruits that are grown without the use of pesticides.
   • In fact, slugs like vegetables more than fruits. They can die from too much sugar, even if it's natural fruit sugar.
2. 2 Include leaves and plants in your slug's diet. Put in the aquarium to the slug plants that you find on the street. In addition, slugs feed on decaying plants, so if you have a dying plant at home, you can feed it to the slug.
3. 3 Clean up leftover food every day. Slugs may not finish all the food you bring them. Food leftovers (especially fruit) attract fruit flies. Fruit flies can harm the slug, so every evening you need to clean up and throw away food leftovers from the slug's aquarium. In this way, you will reduce the risk that your pet's safety will be compromised.
4. 4 Do not use dishes, but a spray bottle. Slugs do not need a separate plate of water, they just need a moist environment. Therefore, every day, spray water into the aquarium from a spray bottle. It's best to use filtered or distilled water because regular tap water can be dangerous to slugs. Humidity is very important because slugs absorb moisture from the air.

3 How to avoid common mistakes

1. 1 Never use any spray near a slug tank. As mentioned above, slugs are very sensitive to chemicals because they absorb everything in the air through their skin. Therefore, in no case do not use hair sprays and other aerosols in the same room as the aquarium with the slug. It can kill your pet!
2. 2 Don't pick up a slug. The slug should not be constantly removed from the aquarium. Only transfer him to another tank or container if you need to clean his tank. Slugs don't like to be touched, and chemicals on your hands (such as leftover soap or hand lotion) are bad for slugs.
3. 3 Don't forget to spray your aquarium every day! Slugs need a moist environment to live. Spray a little distilled water into the slug tank every day. The slug can die if the environment is not moist enough.
   • It is very important to use distilled water. Chemicals found in tap water can kill slug.

• Slugs love shady areas, so don't place your slug tank in direct sunlight. Be sure to put something in the aquarium that will provide the slug with shelter (such as a piece of bark)
• You can put vegetable and fruit trimmings in the aquarium, but only if you are sure that they do not contain pesticides!

Warnings

• Always wash your hands thoroughly before handling a slug. You may have leftover chemicals on your hands, like regular salt, that can harm the slug.
• Slugs can crawl up the walls of the aquarium, so remember to put a lid on the aquarium and make sure that the ventilation holes in the lid are not too big so that the slug does not crawl out of the aquarium through them.

What will you need

• Aquarium
• Vegetables and fruits
• spray bottle
• Distilled or filtered water
• The soil

Slugs - what is it? it land gastropods. shellless. Their closest relatives are shelled gastropods, we call snails.

Snails can also live on land, but most of them still live in the water. Despite the lack of a protective shell, naked slugs often become a real disaster for the garden.

This article will help you get acquainted with their biology, and how a snail differs from a slug, as well as why they appear and what they eat.

What do they look like?

The structure of a naked slug(slug) looks like this. The body of a slug consists of three parts - a head, a body with a mantle and a leg, see the photo on the right.

The body is elongated, slightly flattened from top to bottom. The head is raised and clearly visible, she bears two pairs of tentacles - long, eyes and olfactory receptors sit on them, and short labials, which serve for touch and taste. Mouth in front of head.

Behind the head on the back is a convex "collar" - this is the mantle, inside which is the lung, and on the right side is a breathing hole. The anal opening is located nearby. The leg is the lower surface of the body on which the mollusk crawls.

The skin of the slug is thin, naked and always covered with mucus. The integument usually has a protective coloration- sandy, brown, gray, brown, and sometimes small white and black spots are distributed over a brown background.

The mucus helps the clams glide, cools them down, and protects them from enemies.

Sizes vary from 20 cm to 2 mm depending on the type of slug.

How do they reproduce?

Let's talk about how slugs breed. They are hermaphrodites by nature. each individual bears both the male and female reproductive system.

But for laying eggs cross fertilization is necessary, so that the slugs find each other by scent, and after a short mating dance, which can be an interesting sight, they exchange sperm.

After that, each lays 20-30 eggs in moist soil. After 2-3 weeks, small slugs come out, which feed first on soil organic residues, and after 1.5 months they grow and begin to reproduce.

After a single mating, egg laying continues for a month or longer. During the summer, each slug can lay up to 500 eggs.

In the middle lane, adult slugs, having laid their eggs for the last time, die in the fall. Eggs hibernate; in early June, juveniles appear and after a month of active feeding, they start breeding.

The life cycle, like the development cycle, can speed up or slow down depending on the weather. Sometimes slugs that have not had time to lay their eggs in the fall overwinter in the soil, and start laying in the spring.

09/30/2016 at 15:27

And I breed snails, though African ones. Now the slug lives at home. Normal. Huge. brought from the garden. Experimented this year. I collected a bucket of snails and slugs, took it to the corner of the site. Released next to the fence. Before that, I put two wooden sticks, 25 cm wide. About a meter long. I put a small piece of slate to the fence, not very tight. Any cover is possible. And she threw pieces of kiraich, stones, old pieces of concrete. They are loose. I put three plastic plates. She loosened up a tiny piece of earth. And in the plates I put vegetable peelings, carrots, pumpkin, zucchini, the first leaves of cabbage, lettuce, tops. Tomatoes, buttocks of cucumbers. Grass tore, mowed grass put them slides. A handful of dog food sometimes. Usually three times a
month. All! Friends, experience has shown that snails and. slugs did not crawl further than half a meter! Half a meter from their corner of paradise, I have a garden bed with cucumbers, pumpkins, sunflowers grow, and they all adore sunflower leaves))) periodically laid a leaf for them, quickly ate them) snail eggs (ariantha arbustorum) and slugs are very similar, you can find them in loose earth. Put in a bag and freeze, a week in the freezer, then you can throw it away or it
pure calcium for pets, as well as the number of the clan will noticeably decrease and the crop is intact and there is no need to poison anyone. After all, if you look closely, this is a miracle of nature, a fantasy ..

29.11.2015 at 10:31

We try not to bring the backyard to a state where countering slugs will become an ordeal. I cultivate the land with a cultivator, which loosens it very efficiently. The same, in the sense of loosening, is done by the spouse at the stages of planting care. The result is that there are no large clods of earth where moisture could accumulate, which reduces the number of slugs.

11/10/2015 at 13:19

Slugs on cabbage are very tormenting. If the leaves lie low to the ground, and the summer is rainy, then you can fight them only by cutting off the lower leaves. I was surprised to read the previous post that slugs live in the cellar. This means that the cellar is also damp, it must be dried.

Not a single search engine in the world has yet found a single text with the phrase "slug care", until today. I came across, basically, links to advice to gardeners on how to deal with them, caring for the garden. It is called the most disgusting pest of the garden and vegetable garden. It's time to fix the mistake. Let's talk about slime.

The slug is a land mollusc without a shell. Wikipedia says that this gastropod was a snail in the process of evolution, but lost its shell. According to one hypothesis, he simply switched to a different type of nutrition - leaves, according to another, he began to lack calcium. Without a shell, the slug has become helpless; many animals eat it: rodents, moles, hedgehogs, and birds - ducks, for example, and even insects. Ground beetles feed on slugs. In general, who just does not eat them.

It is unlikely that we will need Serpukhov capacitor units for this. Something else will be needed. We are engaged in a hobby and not saving energy and money.

The big question is, what do slugs eat? They eat leaves, both dry and wet, green, fresh. They generally live in the forest floor, in the wet layer of fallen leaves. Slugs are necrophages, they eat leaves, spreading fungi and viruses along the way, due to which the fallen leaves rot. They eat potatoes, cabbage, mushrooms - even poisonous ones. Everything they eat spoils very quickly and is covered with a thick layer of mucus. They like to eat strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes. Dislikes garlic and cereals. One of the ways to deal with them in the garden is associated with garlic. Garlic is passed through a meat grinder and diluted in a bucket of water. The beds are watered with this water and the slugs do not crawl on them.

Sometimes the slug behaves violently and attacks earthworms.

Everyone who has ever had their own plot of land has come across a slug. Its appearance is rather unpleasant, and many are contemptuous of this mollusk. They may or may not have a reduced shell and are terrestrial gastropods. They appear after rain and give cause for concern to gardeners. Their size can be from 2 to 20 centimeters, and sometimes 30, like roadside slugs.

General information about the mollusk

The mollusk has an elongated elongated body that can change its shape due to muscle contractions. Its body consists of three sections: the head, legs and visceral mass. The legs and torso are separated by an annular furrow. On the head there are tentacles on which the sense organs are located. Behind the head there is a mantle with a pulmonary opening leading to the mantle cavity, which, in fact, performs the function of the lung.

They are always covered in slime. This is a protective reaction against drying out. Coloring can be varied. They are found in gray, brown, yellow and even black. May be spotty. Some types of slugs are bred in aquariums and are considered pets.

Slug varieties

Slugs prefer damp places. If the soil is dry, then they die or clog into the ground. Very often they can be found in the forest or in the garden. A great place for them - thickets of shrubs. They can also live in the far corners of parks, where there is some kind of reservoir nearby. They feed on leaves, mushrooms, berries and flowers. Some species feed on worms. They cannot live in hot places. These mollusks are not found in deserts.

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There are many types of slugs. Many of them are pests. The most common are:

In nature, there are several hundred species of this mollusk.

Characteristics of representatives

Large roadside - the most common type in the garden. It is large in size. Sometimes it is called leopard. Its color is gray-spotted.

The blue slug is often called the Carpathian. This is due to the fact that it is found only in the region of these mountains. It is large and brightly colored. Prefers coniferous and deciduous forests of Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Its diet includes russula, thanks to which the giant blue slug has such an amazing color. The accumulation of this species will be a tip to the mushroom picker. This means that there is a mushroom field nearby somewhere.

The naked slug is the most famous species in Russia. This annoying pest settles not only in the garden, but also loves greenhouses and greenhouses. Leaves large holes on fruits and leaves.

The black species of mollusk is the largest. Some individuals are up to 30 centimeters long. Mushrooms are what slugs of this species feed on. He also loves roots.

Another major representative is the banana slug. It is not found in banana plantations and will not look like a banana, but has a bright yellow color. It feeds on lichen, fungi and rotten leaves.

Carrying out garden processing in the fall from pests and diseases

The field slug is a small species. Its dimensions do not exceed 5-6 centimeters. It lives in valleys and at the edges of forests. Young shoots and wild berries make up its diet. It comes in all shades of brown.

In the thickets of moss, you can find whole groups of reticulated slug. This species loves loose soil and rotten leaves. He is one of the smallest representatives. Its dimensions do not exceed 3 centimeters. Very often has a spotted color.

Shellfish Enemies

They have a lot of enemies. The sun is their main enemy, as they cannot tolerate heat and die. They are loved by predators, such as wild boars. Some vertebrates feed on them. They are food for shrews, hedgehogs and moles. Rodents will not refuse them either.

Snakes, frogs and lizards often feast on slugs. There are a lot of their enemies among the birds. Rooks, starlings, storks, gulls, jackdaws and many other birds prefer to eat them. Of domestic animals, ducks and chickens should be noted, which do not refuse slugs.

Insects are also a threat to shellfish. They are included in the usual diet for ground beetles. Grasshoppers also feed on them. There are many who eat slugs in nature.

Diet and harm to the garden

Most varieties of this mollusk bring tremendous harm not only to gardeners and gardeners, but to all agriculture in general. They feed on more than 150 types of vegetables and fruits, they love not only root crops, but also foliage and plant shoots. They give preference to potatoes, beans, cucumbers, strawberries, tomatoes and many other vegetables, fruits and berries. But they avoid garlic, onions, mustard and basil.

What to do if indoor asparagus turns yellow, dries and crumbles

Very often, entire plantations of grapes and citrus fruits are under the threat of destruction from this pest. Rye and winter wheat are often affected by slugs. They feed not only on grains, but also on seedlings. Buckwheat, flax and spring wheat are avoided.

This is a real disaster for gardeners, as they spread incredibly quickly in the garden. And all because:

• lay dozens of eggs;
• develop rapidly to reproduce offspring;
• They are hermaphrodites and do not need a partner.

Slugs are a source of viral, bacterial and fungal diseases. For this reason, the entire crop often dies. Crawling from one place to another, they spread the infection everywhere. They spread diseases such as:

• spotting cabbage;
• potato late blight;
• downy mildew of beans.

There can be many reasons for the mass spread of the pest:

• not very cold winter;
• rainy summer;
• wet but warm autumn;
• early spring.

It's hard to fight them. Better to take preventive measures. If slugs appear, then you must immediately get rid of them, otherwise the crop cannot be saved.

“Since I was twelve, I have eaten a few strange things and will continue to be happy to crunch on fried locusts or swallow live fish. And yet, unless I change drastically, I will never be able to eat slugs. Just thinking about it gives me stomach cramps.”

This is how Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, better known by her initials M.F.K., begins one of her essays. Possibly the best English-language food writer of the 20th century.

“I tried to look at them with a sober, cold look. She continues. She tried to admire the beauty of their movements, evident in the fast-rolling of the film, forced herself to read in the Encyclopædia Britannica about the harmlessness of everything that forms their slimy bodies. All to no avail. Any mention of these creatures awakens the animal horror dormant somewhere inside me. Slugs are a nightmare, this is something abnormal, I am madly afraid of them and everything connected with them. However, I love snails. Most people love snails."

In that essay, titled "Fifty Million Snails" and first published in 1937, Fischer writes about how one day while living in Dijon, France, she ate so many snails that she became dizzy for two days while the gastropods "turned under the influence of garlic into old rubber. And nothing. She still loved them, as did most of the French, who, she said, ate 50 million snails a year. Since then, consumption volumes have grown so much that they are measured not in pieces, but in tons. Today we are talking about 35 thousand tons per year!

Parisians alone eat 20 tons during the Christmas holidays. I also love snails, although I find it difficult to say why. Honestly, I think I would eat anything after being dipped in hot butter. Even the chunky rubber slippers I wear at my home in Bangkok. I do not know whether to believe the historians who claim that snails were one of the main sources of animal food for the first people. Partly in favor of this theory are the piles of shells found in the caves of ancient man, as well as the fact that catching snails is easy.

It is believed that the Romans were the first to breed them, feeding them with vines and grains. Pliny the Elder (1st century) in the 37-volume Natural History wrote about fried snails, which were eaten with wine before dinner to stimulate the appetite or as a light snack between feasts and orgies, to which his fellow citizens were great hunters. The Gauls, who inhabited the territory of modern France, served snails as a dessert. And in the Middle Ages, the Church allowed them to be eaten during fasting. Usually snails were fried in oil or with onions, cooked on skewers or boiled. One of the earliest accolades for this culinary delicacy appeared in 1394 in the French newspaper Le Managier de Paris.

“Snails should be caught in the morning. Harvest small, black-shelled juveniles from grapes or elderberries and wash them in several changes of water until no more foam appears. Then wash once in salt water or diluted vinegar, fill with fresh water and put to stew.

Next, the snails should be removed from the shell with the tip of a needle or pin, cut off their black tail, as this is their excrement, washed again and stewed in water, then laid on a dish and served with bread. Others say that the preparation described is not enough: the snails should also be fried in oil with onions and flavored with spices - such a dish can be served in the most refined society.

By the 17th century, the popularity of snails had declined. In the following centuries, in a large part of the European continent, they were seen not as a potential delicacy, but as a garden pest. What they are, breeding in myriad quantities and devouring almost any greenery. In France, snails came back into fashion after they were served at the table at a dinner given by Talleyrand in honor of the Russian Tsar. Since then, France has remained the world leader in their consumption.

In England, snails have always been mercilessly fought as a serious threat to agriculture and neglected as food. In a curious book entitled "Why Don't We Eat Insects?", published in London in 1885, its author, Vincent Holt, devotes twelve whole pages to these creatures. Holt believed that snails, like many insects, fell victim to human prejudice, unwillingness to recognize them as a generous and affordable source of protein.

He makes, in particular, the following proposal. “Some progress could be made through the strength of example. Gentlemen could order delicious snail dishes prepared according to recipes used throughout the continent, and in time the servants would begin to imitate them.” Also disturbing, according to Holt, is the erroneous idea that only one type of snail is edible. Whereas the only advantage of its representatives over the rest of the snails is a larger size.

The author is sure of the opposite: all snails are edible. Further, he writes that in Italy and other European countries, in many farms, snails are grown in a kind of reserves. “In specially designated areas of the garden, fenced off with a wooden fence and covered with a net. Hundreds of snails live in such reserves, feeding on fresh vegetables and those herbs that will give them a pleasant taste. I would like to see such reserves in every English garden.

French snail meat recipe.

Classic cooking of snail meat.

The snails that live in vineyards are considered the best. Pour some water into a saucepan and bring to a boil, then lower the snails into it. Boil for a quarter of an hour. Remove the snails from the shells, rinse thoroughly several times, then throw them into clean water and cook for another quarter of an hour. Remove them from the pot and rinse again. Then dry and fry on with a little butter until browned. Serve with some hot sauce.

French-style snail meat.

Crack open the shells and toss the snails into boiling, lightly salted water with herbs to create an organic aromatic bouquet. After a quarter of an hour, remove the snails from the water. Remove from the shells and boil again, then transfer to a saucepan with butter, parsley, pepper, thyme, bay leaf and a little flour. After stewing enough, add a well-beaten egg yolk and lemon juice or a little vinegar to the saucepan.

Isn't it true that one description already causes appetite? Holt's appeals were ignored by his contemporaries, they were never recognized as worthy of the table either in England or in other developed countries. The attitude towards them as food became more and more favorable, which was associated with the gradual transformation of France into the trendsetter of the world culinary fashion. Today, in some areas of this country, snails are starved for a week, or even longer, to remove all toxins from their bodies. Eliminate all unpleasant tastes associated with the food they consume. Elsewhere in France, they are put on an aromatic diet of thyme and other herbs.

How are snails prepared?

They make broth from them; they, right in the shells, are stewed with wine or garlic oil, chili sauce and chives; they are freed from shells and cooked with a white sauce based on butter and flour or with garlic mayonnaise and bérnaise sauce. And they are also grilled, sprinkled with salt, pepper, thyme and ground fennel.

Snails are served with homemade bread and red wine. In Laos and northeastern Thailand, snail snails are harvested during the rainy season from paddy fields, simply boiled and eaten, dipped in a mixture of crushed garlic, chili, fish sauce and coriander leaves. Traditionally, sticky boiled rice serves as a side dish.

Eating the meat of slugs.

If the above and many other recipes for cooking snails have become quite widespread, then slug meat now remains not only at the lowest “gastronomic position”, but for many on the last line in the list of promising culinary products. The unattractive appearance of common garden and marine (nudibranch molluscs) species of slugs, devoid of a pretty, geometrically perfect shell, could serve as an excuse, but crabs, lobsters, oysters, and the same chickens are hardly more attractive "alive".

In fact, the only significant difference between snails and slugs is the shell. It protects the body of most invertebrate mollusks, but slugs lack this armor. Although they belong to the same classification type, along with squids and octopuses. The shell is an important thing, but snails and slugs have a lot in common. Like snails, land slugs feed on plants, usually at night, and therefore are also classified as pests. As for sea slugs, being in many ways similar to their terrestrial relatives, they feed on corals and other animal organisms.

While land slugs have failed to catch the attention of a hungry public, catching and cooking nudibranchs has a long history across vast areas from China and Japan in the south to Eskimo camps in the ice-bound north. Land and sea slugs have some external differences. If the former can be of a wide variety of colors, including red, gray, yellow, black and white, and vary in size, depending on the species and age, then the latter in most cases are gray or black in color, much larger and weigh up to 900 grams.

Alas, history has preserved only a few written evidence of eating sea slugs. One of the earliest dates back to the period before the 5th century and is contained in a fragment of a Chinese source called the Gastronomic Canon. There, these creatures are called haishu, that is, "sea rats", and are described as "similar to leeches, but larger."

Over time, the status of nudibranchs increased, and they began to be called haisheng, which can be translated as "sea ginseng." They were credited with strengthening and tonic properties. In China, nudibranch mollusks were so popular that the emperor sent powerful fleets that reached the shores of Africa and Australia in search of sources of additional supplies.

It got to the point that shellfish became the reason for a real war. In 1415, the then king of Sri Lanka ordered the Chinese ships to leave, but the Chinese responded by sending troops, capturing the king and continuing to fish for slugs at sea and collect along the shores of the island. One of the reasons for the hype around shellfish was their supposed ability to increase male potency. Such an idea was probably based on the external properties of this creature: a long, thick, elastic body that swells when touched.

From the 16th century, a Chinese document has been preserved, which proposed, in the absence of a mollusk, "to take a donkey's penis and be content with it as a gastronomic substitute." In 1913, in Alaska, a woman named Eli Hunt was questioned in her native Kwakiutl about the technology of catching and cooking nudibranch clams. According to her, the hunter, always a man, waited for the ebb and on a canoe swam the remaining lakes of sea water, stringing on a two-pronged spear the abundance of mollusks remaining in them. “He takes a knife and cuts off the head of the slug. Then he squeezes his insides into the water and with force throws him to the bottom of the canoe with words. "Now you'll be as hard as your grandfather's cock."

On the shore, the mollusks were hovered for two days, then the slugs were boiled over an open fire. Since the water almost always went over the edge during cooking, the man, according to the narrator, threw handfuls of dirt from the floor of the hut into the cauldron and thus supported the cooking process. After cooking, the clams were washed again and served as is. Today, nudibranch mollusks, sometimes called sea cucumbers because of their shape, are most often dried, soaked for several days and then boiled, changing the water several times, until the original spongy tissue structure is restored.