Years ago I had a housemate and she told me that every night, a slug would leave a trail on her bedroom mat and this was going on for years. She could never find it or catch it.
She went away for a week or so for work so I poured some salt on her mat.
Next morning I go look and I find the slug stuck in the middle of the mat unable to escape.
Took a photo of it, tossed it out into the garden and vacuumed the mat.
Showed her the photo when she returned and told her what I had done. She was so relieved that the phantom slug had been dealt with.
My guess is it got in through the window and was never able to find its way out and probably hid somewhere in her room during the day, coming out at night to uh… feast on… no idea.
It’s probably like a fly, can find its way into houses and things but not get out. It probably found a way onto the mat through the least resistance and then didn’t find a way back out by the time I found it.
They’re actually quite resilient especially if weather is humid. They don’t need to eat every night either. I’ve had slugs in houses where there was no visible food left for them, and they stayed. They do like scraping mold and rot off a variety of surfaces, so it’s most likely it survived on whatever was growing or rotting underneath the carpet, or behind a damp wooden skirting or windowsill. Stuff that us humans wouldn’t notice unless went literally looking for it
Maybe this is a regional specific thing, but if I kept finding a weird streak in my bathroom, I would never in a million years assume a sneaky slug suspect.
Years ago I had a housemate and she told me that every night, a slug would leave a trail on her bedroom mat and this was going on for years. She could never find it or catch it.
She went away for a week or so for work so I poured some salt on her mat.
Next morning I go look and I find the slug stuck in the middle of the mat unable to escape.
Took a photo of it, tossed it out into the garden and vacuumed the mat.
Showed her the photo when she returned and told her what I had done. She was so relieved that the phantom slug had been dealt with.
This leads to more questions than answers for me.
Where was the slug coming from, and if it had got onto the mat despite the salt, why couldn’t it go back the same way?
My guess is it got in through the window and was never able to find its way out and probably hid somewhere in her room during the day, coming out at night to uh… feast on… no idea.
It’s probably like a fly, can find its way into houses and things but not get out. It probably found a way onto the mat through the least resistance and then didn’t find a way back out by the time I found it.
They’re actually quite resilient especially if weather is humid. They don’t need to eat every night either. I’ve had slugs in houses where there was no visible food left for them, and they stayed. They do like scraping mold and rot off a variety of surfaces, so it’s most likely it survived on whatever was growing or rotting underneath the carpet, or behind a damp wooden skirting or windowsill. Stuff that us humans wouldn’t notice unless went literally looking for it
Maybe this is a regional specific thing, but if I kept finding a weird streak in my bathroom, I would never in a million years assume a sneaky slug suspect.
This was in her bedroom, and it looked like the regular snail or slug slime trail.
If you had seen it in person, you’d have known.
Of I misread it was in her bedroom. That’s waaaay worse! I wouldn’t be able to sleep with a rogue slug on the loose.
Decoy slug.
What’s a bedroom mat?
A small rug I guess, just a square piece of carpet that I couldn’t bring myself to call a rug.
It’s a room with a big mattress you can sleep on - but please, my name’s not Matt.
A mat that’s in a bedroom.