Slug extraordinary

On the path over West Hill, around noon on the 22nd August. As I recall, a warm and sunny day, enough so that I was carrying water.

Between three and four inches long, rather over half an inch fat at the fattest point.

Thinking to be funny, I thought that maybe I should post it as a Leopard Slug and was all set to cod up a leopard flavoured scientic name when I learned from google that it might well be the fairly rare limax maximus, otherwise the Leopard slug. Perhaps a juvenile, as wikipedia tells me the adults are between 4 and 8 inches in length.

If indeed it was one of these, wikipedia also tells me that, for an invertebrate of very little brain it does quite well: 'limax maximus is capable of associative learning, specifically classical conditioning, because it is capable of aversion learning and other types of learning. It can also detect deficiencies in a nutritionally incomplete diet if the essential amino acid methionine is experimentally removed from its food'. Not so well though that it doesn't find itself on an exposed pavement in the middle of the day - regarding which google suggests that the big problem will be heatstroke rather than predation as they are not a favoured food of the sort of large birds you might find in such a context.

As a lapsed friend of the earth (they were too political and spent too much of my subscription on sending me junk mail), I have sent in a sighting report to reference 1.

Reference 1: https://www.opalexplorenature.org/.