Hunting for banana slugs in the Bloedel Reserve with David George Gordon

An outing to see a special plant as it flowers, or to spy through binoculars at young birds as they hatch, is one of the pleasures of living in a place that is so close to nature. Freelance writer Kathryn True, co-author of a Mountaineers guide, "Nature In the City: Seattle," presents another in a series of occasional stories offering ideas for such outings.

It's that fertile time of year when plant lovers fret over flower seedlings, birders tune their ears to tease apart warblers' competing melodies, lepidopterists dust off their butterfly nets and David George Gordon goes on slug watch. Banana slugs, to be precise.

A biologist and author of "Field Guide to the Slug," Gordon was inspired to study invertebrates by an enthusiastic college professor. A born nature nut, he idolized Marlin Perkins of "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" fame. Glued to the black-and-white TV in his Chicago living room, the 5-year-old Gordon was a devoted watcher of Perkins' first show, "Zoo Parade." "I've become the Marlin Perkins of banana slugs," he said smiling.

The people at Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island weren't sure what to make of him in his Perkins-inspired pith helmet, carrying a squirt bottle (to rehydrate our intendeds). We were there to visit moist, undisturbed forested areas preferred by banana slugs.

"I see you brought your window washer with you," cracked a well-dressed man in the estate-house visitors center. Maybe he was offended that this phenomenal landscape was the savanna of our slug safari. But as Gordon explained later, it's actually a compliment to be a banana-slug haven:

"They're totemic of old growth and indicators of healthy forests. They're the little guys who build the forest by processing the material and pooping out the good stuff."

Strangers in a foreign land

The fact that slugs are the scourge of Northwest gardeners is ironic in that most of the lettuce-mangling culprits are nonnative stowaways who arrived on, you guessed it, bulbs from Holland and Germany imported for (ahem) gardeners.

Others came by ship with vegetables from Europe. These more aggressive invaders have thrived here in the absence of natural predators, sometimes to the detriment of our native slugs.

With a curious nod from the Bloedel Reserve staff, we headed into a mossy elf-land studded with skunk cabbages so wide you could almost crawl inside one and take a nap — if it weren't for that smell.

Members of the phylum Mollusca, slugs are related to clams, octopuses and conchs. They share the class gastropoda (which means stomach foot) with the marine snails. Their closest cousins are the shelled land snails.

Although slugs have the advantage of not needing calcium to build shells, they don't have one to retreat into, either. Being prone to drying out, moisture is essential to their survival and they happily thrive in the Northwest — some 23 species live on the Olympic Peninsula.

Slug sex, slime and more

Along a narrow pathway we moved aside ferns and looked for telltale slime trails, when suddenly I heard Gordon wolf whistle, "What a beaut!"

There, beneath a protective umbrella of bleeding heart, our first banana slug stretched in all his/her olive-colored, 7-inch-long glory. (His/her because slugs are hermaphrodites, packing both male and female reproductive organs. Slug sex involves intricate mating rituals, lots of slime, outsize genitalia, yin-yang positioning ... and that's just what's fit to print.)

"Banana slugs are elegant if you look at their design, coloration and size — they're like the bald eagle of the slugs and worth going out of your way to find," Gordon said.

They're smart, too, for having a group of nerve ganglia instead of a brain. "Slugs are a lot more attentive to what's going on around them than we give them credit for," he continued. "They pick up stuff we don't have a clue about — infrared sensors in their eye stalks help them sense heat, they feel subtle vibrations with that enormous enervated foot and they're extremely plugged in to seasonal changes."

Slugs' bodies are covered with sensory cells that allow them to taste and smell their way along the forest floor, leaving encoded slime messages for other slugs as they go: "Great lichen here!" or "You're in my space!"

They can adjust the viscosity of their slime to keep from slipping on vertical climbs or to crawl over edges as sharp as a razor blade. Slug slime's unique way of storing and releasing moisture is even being studied by cancer researchers developing new drug-delivery methods.

"Ugh, it's a slug"

Gordon continued up the trail, a bounce in his step: we had entered slug territory. We next found 2-inch-long baby slugs — born last fall and overwintered, Gordon guessed. Eye stalks withdrawn, they waited single-file on a skunk cabbage leaf.

Like a good mushroom hunter who spies chanterelles half-buried under fall leaves a mile off, Gordon had an uncanny ability to conjure the camouflaged mollusks from the forest floor's shadowy recesses — we found several with spots, a few almost yellow and several pure-olive-green dandies. Soon we had counted 18 of them.

"Most people just look them and say 'Ugh, it's a slug' without noticing individual features," he said. "You should be able to tell common species apart like you can a pelican from a crow, so you know whether or not a slug belongs or not.

"We don't understand the significance of the banana slug in the whole forest ecosystem," Gordon said. "One day we might say, 'Where are all the deer?' and find out the slugs used to tend the deer fern — we just don't know."

Picking up a choice spotted specimen and resting it on his arm, Gordon was indifferent to being slimed. He encourages people to watch banana slugs more closely and even to keep them as pets. In a home "slugarium" he once witnessed the hatching of 30 babies, which he carefully released in their parents' homeland, the Hoh Rain Forest.

"They make good pets," Gordon said, "And because they're so little-studied, you could discover something about them that nobody else knows."

Freelance writer Kathryn True of Vashon Island is a regular contributor to NWWeekend. Contact her through her Web site: kathryntrue.com.