Slugs

what little boys are made of
Originally uploaded by jurvetson.

I thought this was a pretty good photo on Flickr but it reminded me on something...

One of the things YY found fascinating in England this time was that we came across a slug whilst walking in Ashdown Forest. She says she's never seen a slug before and that China doesn't have any.

On return, this has been sufficiently interesting to her to remember to tell other people, who have come from a variety of different parts of China, but they also have "never heard of such a thing in China".

I have to say I assumed slugs were pretty much universal and I'm still not convinced that they're not.

YY comes from Gansu province which in fairly recent geological time was clearly an area of desert. It's mostly sandstone now but you can see that the mountains are all in the patterns of dunes from the air. It's clearly dry, thin, sandy soil so I can well imagine that slugs would have a very hard time penetrating this area but Zhejiang (green, fertile, wet) would seem very easy territory for slugs?