thenaturejournal.com

Painting slugs from photos

April 3rd, 2009

Limacus flavus

Barbara Nitz sent me excellent photos of Limacus flavus from Germany, so I began with this species. The slugs in her photos varied in colour from dark brown, through green, to orange. The only direct side view was taken of the most orange individual, so that is the one I used as reference. Luckily Barbara had also taken dorsal photos of this animal, so I didn’t have to guess at the pattern. I learned how to most easily transfer the measurements and proportions of a slug in a photos to the page. My photos are on the computer, each view in a separate “viewer” window. First I decide how long the painted slug is to be, relative to other species I have painted. I measure the length on paper and then drag the corner of the viewer window until the size of the photo corresponds to the size that the illustration will be. As I proceed to draw, I measure each part of the slug in the photo.

As with all the other species (below) that I have had to paint without seeing the live animal, it was frustrating not to be able to take a “closer look” and I sadly missed the opportunity to “meet” each species as a living being, with its texture and its habits and its personality. The most distinctive thing about Limacus flavus that I found in working from the photos, beside the blue eye stalks, is how the colour pattern corresponds to the tubercles like tiles in a mosaic.

Testacella haliodidea

Testacella! Some day perhaps I will see one of these alive! Another European immigrant, this slug is a burrower, and preys upon earthworms. You don’t see a pneumostome because it is somewhere in the mantle beneath the little shell on the tail. It is amazing to think of the main part of its body acting as a long, muscular “neck”. This is a molluscan giraffe! I imagine that the shell may be useful as an anchor in worm burrows, as Testacella sinks its fanged radula into a big strong worm, and battles with it underground!

Magnipelta mycophaga

… is a northwestern North American native. I think it’s name translates as Mushroom-eating Large-mantle. Its richly mottled mantle is like a cape, and its body beneath like pleated gray skirts - a most elegant slug, another whom I would be excited to meet someday! For this painting I worked from one rather blurry side view of one rather black-and-white patterned animal, and a number of nice crisp dorsal and three-quarters views of a much browner individual. It was a challenge to combine them.

Hemphillia camelus

The Camel Jumpingslug! This native of British Columbia is another I look forward to meeting. The Dromedary Jumpingslug is more boldly coloured, being partly blue - but its range is restricted to Vancouver Island, so I decided I should paint the more widespread of the two. …And besides, it is hard to know how blue to make a slug that looks blue in a photo! When disturbed in the open, this slug twists its body and drops off whatever it is on… as close to jumping as you’re going to see in a slug. It’s other special feature is the slit in its mantle which reveals the large internal shell. Most slugs have a vestigial internal shell, but Hemphillia has not completed this evolutionary process of internalizing it. You can see it gleaming, shiny and greenish, within the mantle slit.

Boettgerella pallens

I wanted to leave this slug for the last, because I can hardly believe it! But I still not have received either a living Milax, or more photos of Milax… so I had to paint Boettgerilla. What a weird slug - and this individual, as you can see, was blue in the photos, so I had to paint it blue. But as I focused on each detail (and the photos are very good close-ups) it “came to life” as I percieved and panted slugly features. Yes, it has a pneumostome, and a mantle, and eye stalks, and its body even has the pigmented pattern of tubercles. My daughter Jennifer called it a “fairy slug”. Notice that it is heading downward. The one in the photo probably disappeared into the moss a couple of seconds after the camera clicked. Perhaps this species would have been the hardest one of all to paint from life, as it is called the “Wormslug” - maybe it wouldn’t do well in the open for more than a minute at a time!

Milax gagates

This slug was painted at the very end of the contract, right up against the deadline for submitting the book, “Identifying Land Snails and Slugs in Canada - Introduced Species and Native Genera”. Time had run out for getting a live specimen of Milax gigas from anywhere! When I looked in my photo files to begin this last illustration, I was appalled to find that only one of the few photos I’d found in my internet search was certainly Milax gagates (according to species descriptions), and so I wrote to Barbara in Germany, asking her if she or any of her colleagues had good photos. They don’t. Barbara raised M. gagates for a study a while ago, but didn’t photograph them, and didn’t keep any alive. So I resigned myself to copying the only photo I had, which doesn’t show the pneumostome clearly, and doesn’t show the edge of the sole at all!

To me, Milax gagates has the overall aspect of a giant Deroceras laeve, but it doesn’t have a pale pneumostome, and it seems to have a large internal shell, which gives an English saddle shape to its mantle. It also has a body keel, which Deroceras does not have. Apparently there are variations in colour. Perhaps Milax is too “ordinary” a slug for folks to want to take photos of it. But now, after doing so many detailed watercolours, no slug looks “ordinary” to me!

Posted in Art, slugs | 1 Comment »

Shipped live from Washington state

April 1st, 2009

Arion species (unidentified)

This slug is so long and extensible - elastic! When resting it has a usual Arion shape, and can hump itself up into a rectangular lump when disturbed (which Arion circumscriptus cannot do), but while crawling, it just stretches longer and longer! In order to show an average aspect, I don’t paint my slugs fully extended, so this portrait does not show this beast at its extreme, which is at least another 5 mm. It is not particularly shy, willing to wake up and walk about when nudged gently, or when its substrate is tilted or rotated. It had two wounds made by the fast, agressive little Deroceras panormitanum - luckily on the left side, as my portrait is of the side with the pneumostome. When I first opened the lid upon receiving the parcel from Washington state, I noticed one of the Deroceras following a slowly crawling Arion, and biting its tail! I immediately found several plastic sandwich containers and began to isolate all of the Deroceras, one to each box. I selected the largest Arion to begin painting, leaving the others in the thermos jug they were shipped in.

On March 14 I wrote to my family:

“Well, after a full day of painting, beginning at about 11:00 am, and finishing around 10:00 pm - I have the “mystery slug” painted, very frustrating because it wasn’t even on my list of species for the book, and we’re so close to the deadline. I couldn’t leave it until after the deadline, however, because the nasty little dragon-slugs Deroceras panormitanum, which it was shipped with from Washington state, had taken chunks out of its left side and tail fringe, and that might have compromised its health in captivity.

Not a remarkably beautiful slug, but it was sent from Olympia, Washington with the other pale-footed slugs as Arion circumscriptus, along with yellow-footed Arion distinctus…. but the closer I looked as I began to draw it as circumscriptus, the more different it began to look from the other gray-footed slugs in the shipment.

Looking closely enough at a creature to paint it faithfully is fascinating, literally! …. and looking at a creature that the specialists shrug and turn their palms up at (our coauthor Robert Forsyth did that too), is an irresistable challenge.

I photographed both kinds of gray-footed Arions, and made a list of their differing characteristics for most of one day, and spent most of the next day (yesterday) drawing the larger of them - and correcting my drawing - and correcting it again, countless times! I had begun by copying my painting of Arion distinctus, because I was told that it was similar, but with a gray foot. But by the time I was finished adjusting that drawing, it looked considerably slimmer than distinctus, and with more rows of tubercles. Its lateral line does arch over the pneumostome (breathing hole) as it is supposed to do in circumscriptus, but that doesn’t make it circumscriptus. The other slim Arion slug I’ve painted is A. fasciatus… but this one is even slimmer than that, and fasciatus has a yellow foot besides.

It could be another European introduction, even one that is not found in Canada and therefore doesn’t belong in our book - who knows! I will send it to Robert to dissect. Perhaps DNA analysis can be done at some point. I am beginning to think like a taxonomist about Arion slugs.

Only a few days ago I was expounding the basic philosophical wholesomeness of taxonomic work to Corey in the kitchen. Taxonomists are the ‘namers’, giving us information about the distinctness of living things, one from another. Providing us with names with which to know them, and care about them - so we can make decisions about whether it is wise to step over them in the woods or necessary to pave them over for commercial developments. In the book of Genesis, God instructed Adam to name the plants and animals He had made, as part of his position as steward in the garden of Eden. Author of fantasies Ursula LeGuin describes the education of wizards on the Isle of Roke - the last and most difficult task before they are considered mature wizards, responsible enough to change the shape of anything, is to learn the true name of each kind of living thing. Responsible members of any community learn the names of their neighbours. It is part of ‘caring’. The name of our neighbour serves as an essential reference for thinking, learning, and communicating about that neighbour. Every creature whose name we know becomes a part of us.

Today I told Fred that I think I’ve found ‘my taxon’ - the kind of creature that I am most curious about the names of…. Arion slugs! They are a most convenient group to work on, living nearly everywhere, You can find the ubiquitous alien Deroceras reticulatum eating gardens everywhere too, but there are nearly always some kind (sometimes two or three kinds!) of Arion slug along with them. Arions don’t chase and bite other slugs like Deroceras laeve and Deroceras panormitanum, so they will be easy to keep groups of them in captivity. Slugs lay eggs readily, and they usually hatch successfully without much attention except sufficient mosture. Their generation times are short, so breeding experiments are convenient. They stay healthy on damp paper with Romaine lettuce to eat, and egg shells for calcium. I look forward to learning how to dissect them - a finicky, tedious procedure for determining internal differences in genetalia, that I thought I’d never be interested in doing. But when one has found one’s taxon, nothing is too finicky for finding the differences that matter to the species themselves!

Fred regaled the staff of the Brigadoon Restaurant about our recent malacological adventures, as he and Matt were there this evening after checking the Oxford Mills dam for Mudpuppies. He said they stood around, mouths open in awe, hearing things they’d never imagined, as he described the intensity of the efforts of our team to arrange for the collecting and importation of live slugs for me to paint. This afternoon he commented to me that he’d better sharpen his spade, to beat off other men, as my taking up Arion taxonomy was the sexiest thing he’d ever heard of.

Another thing about taking up a taxon, is that although it is a time-consuming pursuit, there are no deadlines. No-one can tell how long it could take to discover the name of a thing, so one just works on it in whatever time one can find.

I don’t think my new passion will be complicate my life unduly, as I would only spend time on it when I have time for it. Picking up slugs doesn’t take much time, and neither does making sure they all have fresh lettuce. They are easy to kill and preserve, and the collection doesn’t take up much room either. Though painting them would take some time……

Anyway, it’s past bedtime. I’ll be drawing Arion circumscriptus tomorrow.

Love, Aleta”

Arion circumscriptus

distinctly black-speckled, tan-to-grey mantle & back
dark reddish-black tentacles
sides neutral pale grey
mantle sides tannish grey below lateral line
foot wide (spindle-shaped body)
foot pale grey
foot fringe very pale yellow
tail abruptly tapered to a point

These are the characters I noticed as I was painting this shy, gentle slug, not yet quite sure of its identity. Sometimes it is good when one hasn’t put a creature “in a slot”, because then you take more careful note of everything about it. This is definitely Arion circumscriptus according to my slug experts Bill and Robert.

The Arion circumscriptus were all smaller than the slug I’d just painted, and they rested on a wet surface with their foot fringes spread out in a skirt, giving their oval bodies almost a limpet shape. They were also liberally freckled with black. When I finished the portrait of the large slug (which I am calling the “Mystery Arion”) and began to draw the Arion circumscriptus, I was impressed with its shyness. Prodding it never resulted in a resumption of activity. I just had to wait, tilting the substrate gently, and holding it under the light. The shy little slug eventually decided to get up and move to a more peaceful spot, and so I got to photograph it, and to watch it closely to paint.

Next I painted the Deroceras panormitanum that had been chasing my poor Arion circumscriptus around and taking bites out of it.

Deroceras panormitanum

March 19:

I made some interesting observations while working with these slugs (I used two of the four you sent (one died upon arrival, and was preserved promptly).

Although they are sluggish on damp leaf litter in their containers, these “racing slugs” become very active, and ‘run’ very fast when put on a foreign substrate, like the flexible plastic ruler I use while painting. During the course of the “live sitting”, I can’t take my eyes off one of these fast slugs for more than a few seconds at a time, because it creeps about a centimetre per second toward the edge and drops off. A couple of times, when ambling rather than running, D. panormitanum has gone over the edge leaving a strand of slime attached to the edge, and dangling head-down, descended slowly.

The first time, the slug slowed to a stop at about 10 cm below the edge of the ruler. After waiting for about a minute, twisting and spinning slowly only 3 centimetres above a lettuce leaf, cupping its foot so that the fringe edges looked like the blades on a weirdly flexible bobskate. Then it began to swing its head and neck from side to side in “U” shapes 8 or 10 times, before making contact and climbing up its own body and then up the slime strand, which by this time had dried and become very thin, like a single strand of spider silk. It climbed up the strand, rather than eating it, and in about 15 seconds, was up over the edge of the ruler.

The second slime-strand was much longer, measuring about 25 cm. I had someone hold the ruler for me as I tried to get some photos, but the slug was swinging and the camera wouldn’t focus on it. This time the slug dropped a few centimetres to the dark blue tablecloth, rather than climbing back up the strand.

These “racing slugs” run very far on the flexible ruler during the course of painting, and when they begin to look a little dry and desperate, I give them a rest in their container while I continue to paint, referring to photos, or take a break myself.

On one of these occasions the slug had made a dash for freedom just as I pressed the lid on its container, and got trapped in the groove of the lid for twenty minutes or so, until I opened the container to resume painting. The poor slug looked rather deformed, but it straightened itself out somewhat as it crawled slowly under a leaf, so I left it to rest for a few hours. On checking it later, I noticed it curled in a “U” shaped position, and then it reached for the side of its tail and began a licking motion. After 7 or 8 ‘licks’ it turned away, and there was an opening in the previously unbroken brown skin, a fresh gap about 1.5 mm long, revealing the translucent grey flesh beneath. My best guess is that the slug had excoriated its bruise - if it were not mistaking its own side for the wounded flesh of another slug, it was perhaps aiding its own healing by making a fast-healing cut where there had been a slow-healing bruise.

This afternoon, as I packed the slugs up after finishing the painting, I peeked inside each apartment. I was pleased to see the wounded slug looking plump and active, albeit with a slightly shortened and dented aspect to the left side of its tail - the wound appeared to be healing over. In the second slug’s container, where it rested in the dark damp space between two dead leaves, there were about 15 newly-laid eggs, clear as glass. Peeking again at the wounded slug just before closing the lid, I noticed a tiny, slim figure of a minute slug, only 1.5mm long - a greyish pink baby Deroceras panormitanum (couldn’t have been an Arion, as their hatchlings are quite plump). It was crawling quite quickly, so I reached for my camera, but by the time it was turned on and set to macro, the little one had disappeared. Racing Slugs!

Later I wrote to Bill Leonard:

“It is difficult deciding on an aspect for a slug, when it looks so different when first discovered, slippery with slime, and when its been crawling and dry. Also, whether it’s contentedly moving, or dashing, neck full out. My mental image of D. panormitanum now, after having spent so much time with it, is different than I have it in the painting. It is reaching, neck arched like a little racehorse, tentacles stretched to thinness, and foot narrowed for speed. Quite a different aspect than the placid one I have painted. That’s why I particularly wanted to see if you recognized its likeness in the painting”. (He answered that the position I have painted it in is recognizable and quite appropriate.)

Posted in Art, slugs | Comments Off

Bananaslug - really!

January 4th, 2009

Ariolimax columbianus

Jane, our intrepid British Columbia slug hunter searched for the alien Worm Slug (Boettgerilla pallens) without success on Vancouver Island this fall, but she did capture a native Pacific Bananaslug (Ariolimax columbianus) in Vancouver. She made a liason with the Malacologist Robert Forsyth at the Vancouver airport, just as he was about to board a plane to Ottawa to attend COSEWIC (Committee On the Status of Endangered Wildlife In Canada) meetings, and slipped him the container, which he carried onto his flight and passed to me as I met him at the Lord Elgin Hotel. The giant slug (120 mm) was alive and well, though it had thoroughly slimed up the moss and paper towel in its container.

The skin of this beast is amazingly slick. Although the body has longitudinal grooves, they are finely incised on a smooth flat surface, nothing like the tubercular ridges of Limax maximus. The colour is like green pea soup, except that the foot fringe pales to yellow toward the front. Most Ariolimax have black spots. This one is unmarked, even lacking the usual black marking in the centre of the mantle. On Vancouver Island we found the Bananaslugs wildly variable, from the usual olive green to white - to orange sherbet coloured, with varying amounts of black, some spotted like pinto ponies! Sorry to paint such a dull one for you - but not sorry to have made the close aquaintance of another giant slug, whose facial expressions are ever changing, and who on more than one occasion raised its head up, eye stalks straining, “the better to see you with, my painter”.

Large invertebrates always amaze me, whether they be crayfish or starfish or clams or slugs. As highly visible representatives of the overwhelmingly vast and diverse world of tiny invertebrates, they give me an insight into their feelings and make me feel very small in the face of their giantness. It’s a strange sort of inside-out feeling!

Posted in Art, slugs | Comments Off

Black Spruce bog, Cochrane

December 14th, 2008

This is one of my favorite plein air oils, painted in the fall of 1992, while sitting in the moss in a bog south of Cochrane, Ontario. It took two afternoons. We were camped nearby on a closed loop of the old highway.

Bogs are exhillarating places for me - the sharp acidic smell of the sphagnum, the clean cushiony texture of it, the rich contrasting reds, oranges and greens of the moss itself… the visual excitement of the tracery of Cranberry over the sphagnum. The micro-topography of a bog is interesting, in contrast to its flat aspect from a distance - it is always hummocky, and the little pools of black water are like reflective jewels in settings of brocade and filigree. The stunted aspect of the trees, and to realize that they can be centuries old and no taller than myself, is very personal somehow. I admire the tenacity and hardiness of the few plant species that can survive in bogs - and that most of them are evergreen. The plants that survive in the sterile acidic matrix of Sphagnum can only do so by special adaptations, like those who keep microrhizal fungi on their roots, to digest the moss and release nutrients - and the exotic-looking Pitcher Plants which collect their own food by drowning insects. The simplicity of there being so few species that I can know them all, is also personal. Where else can you be and know the names of everything you see around you?

Posted in Art, plein air paintings | Comments Off

Another batch of slug watercolours

December 9th, 2008

Deroceras reticulatum

I have just finished the third dorsal view of this ubiquitous slug introduced from Europe, Deroceras reticulatum, the milky-slimed muncher in every garden, variable in colour and fast moving. You can see the flat spot in the rear portion of its mantle, where the vestigial shell sits, internally. The finger-print wrinkles are slighter just over this bit of shell that reminds us that slugs are relatives of snails. It has two characteristics that make it easy to tell apart from its native cousin D. laeve. D. reticulatum has a large pale area surrounding its pneumostome, or breathing hole, and when the animal is touched, it exudes exceedingly sticky white mucous which is hard to get off your hands, and can cause dermatitis in the slug collector.

The lateral view and first dorsal view were painted from a 45mm individual collected by Judy Courteau, from under an Elm tree near Dunville, Ontario, on 23 September. The second dorsal view was collected by Fred, from under the “Novisuccinia board” here in Bishops Mills, field number 2008/279/db, and the third dorsal view (the pale one) was collected by Judy in the spring, from a greenhouse in Smiths Falls.

Deroceras laeve

is native, a feisty little slug. It moves even faster than D. reticulatum, having a very narrow foot on which it practically runs about, sometimes chasing other slugs and biting their tails. It is more or less dark brown with chestnut mottling, especially on the mantle, which is boldly wrinkled - but from above and without magnification, it appears black. When disturbed, it exudes a clear mucous which seems to fill in all the wrinkles and make its body appear smooth and shiny. The pneumostome is not as noticeably pale as it is in D. reticulatum. The individual I painted here is 28mm from head to tail, and was collected by Judy Courteau on 17 September at Highway 90, east of Angus, Ontario.

Pallifera dorsalis

is a tiny native slug of forests east of the prairies. On close inspection it is unmistakeable, having a smooth (very slightly wrinkled) gray mantle covering its entire body, from head to tail. The eye stalks are darker, and the front of the foot, near the mouth, is rusty coloured. This individual, 12mm from head to tail, was bluish-gray when it was taken into captivity at Little Cove on the Bruce Penninsula, by Matt Keevil. For the first week it did not stray from the little piece of moss that it had been collected with, avoiding the scrap of Romaine lettuce that is the fare of all of our captive slugs. But after a week or so it began to eat the lettuce, and by the time I got around to painting it, its body colour had changed from blue gray to more of an olive gray. I made a compromise and painted it somewhere in between.

Arion intermedius

is another small slug, delicate, yellowish with tints of blue, a yellow foot, faint lateral stripes, and black eye stalks which give it the classy aspect of a siamese cat. Along with the other Arion slugs, it is an European immigrant. The few individuals that we caught on our trip in August of this year (at least two localities) are the first slugs of this species recorded in Ontario outside of greenhouses. They may have been “naturalized” for decades, but being easily overlooked, and since the landscape was not crawling with malacologists, they were not reported until we discovered them. Robert sent me one from British Columbia (where they live along the coast) earlier in the summer, but it must have either perished or been eaten by one of the larger slugs, because I searched through its box in vain. I was very happy to have this one to paint, 25 mm in length, and collected near the Durham Conservation Centre, West Grey, Grey County, Ontario. As I painted its portrait, I delighted in its unique aspect and charming habits - one of which was to curl up like a cat, head to tail, to have a nap. When disturbed, it assumed a classic Arion hump-shape, which I have also painted here.

Arion distinctus

This slug we suspected is Arion hortensis because of its orange foot, placement of lateral stripes, and dark colour. Robert decided that it is Arion distinctus, in the A. hortensis species group. It is 40 mm long, which is the maximum length of the species, according to the European Land Snails book. It was collected by Judy Courteau from a greenhouse on River Road in Ottawa, another European introduction. Like Arion intermedius, it also curls up like a cat, head-to-tail, to sleep between meals. It hollowed out the yellow snap bean, favours the green ones less well, but avoids Romaine lettuce, which is a favorite of most of our molluscan guests.

Arion fasciatus

from Coburg, Ontario, is 50mm long from tiny dark head to the tail at the end of its exceedingly extensible body. When it was crawling fast, it just got longer and thinner like an earthworm, at least 15mm longer than the position in which I have portrayed it. The yellow tint below its lateral lines is a diagnostic feature, as is the pale yellow foot.

Posted in Nature notes, Art, slugs | Comments Off

Limax maximus art critic

October 5th, 2008

The Giant Garden Slug, Limax maximus, has charmed me again. I haven’t seen one since I was four years old, in Seattle, Washington. The subtle colours, the handsome spots and stripes, the graceful reaching, tentative progress, delicate cool touch - I’ve been enthralled and delighted all over again as I turned the scrap of dampened board this way and that to orient the creature according to my painting as it crawls, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland…. faster and faster just to stay in the same place. This individual was collected along with a young one, in a tangled copse of mixed woods in a town on Georgian Bay named Dyers Bay on the Bruce Penninsula, Ontario, in August of this year. This marvelous mollusc is about 12 centimetres fully extended, and I think it is not quite full grown!

Posted in Nature notes, Art, slugs | 1 Comment »

Slugging Away!

July 29th, 2008

Prophysaon andersonii, one of the tail-dropping slugs from British Columbia. 50mm head to tail. You can see the change in texture , diagonally, about a quarter of the way forward from the tip of the tail. I didn’t challenge it to drop its tail, for obvious reasons.

The interesting thing about the personality of this slug was its liking for doubling back on itself - turning and crawling alongside its body.

Another BC slug, Arion subfuscus . 35mm head to tail. This species likes to curl into a circle to rest, head to tail-tip, which gives me the impression of a child sucking its thumb. Arion slugs seem dense and muscular, and their tails have a ribbed texture.

This massive black Arion slug is now called Arion rufus after the reddish colour phase. But I prefer the old name, Arion ater, which I believe means “black”. Totally awesome, this beast! The first one I ever saw in the wild was in a roadside bed of tall Horsetail on Vancouver Island. I shouted excitedly to Fred that I’d found a “black licorice slug”. The individual that I have painted here is an adult, 150 mm long. Actually, the meaning of Arion is “horse”. This is one hefty horse of a slug!

I feel so privileged to paint these animals from life - to get to know the personality of each individual, and enjoy discovering the differences between species. Physical differences, and differences in behaviour. They actually get used to being observed by me as I set them on a damp stick which I hold in my left hand as I draw and paint with my right. Shy at first, they spend some time hunched up with their heads tucked under the front edges of their mantles, but eventually each one decides to move.

The black Arion does a very strange thing, which reminds me more than a little of a rabbit tucking its head under to receive and re-ingest the special soft fecal pellet that is part of good rabbit nutrition. Periodically this slug attended to its hinder end - eating the clear mucous that accumulated at the opening of its tail-tip mucous gland. Then it returned to its usual business, which in this case was slowly and deliberately searching for a way off the stick. It holds its breathing hole, the pneumostome, very wide open, and I could see the ivory, cottony-textured flesh inside as it took tiny puff-breaths which made the centre of its mantle rise and fall a little about once a second.

Slugs do not defecate from their tail-ends. They extrude long green strings of gut contents from beneath the front flap of the mantle, right next to the pneumostome - which I seem to remember being held closed during the process.

Now here is the “red” phase of Arion rufus, an immature individual, about 55 mm long. Very cute, don’t you think? I like the black “siamese” face. What a challenge, to paint in transparent watercolour, the gray body beneath the golden tubercular skin!

Posted in Nature notes, Art, slugs | Comments Off

Phase One - the Burr Oak’s Story
June 1st, 2008

After three windy mornings of sitting with my oil paints and canvas on an old licheny tree fort platform, I feel that I’ve been given a vision of the world of this ancient Burr Oak. Older than Manotick, the rural village that is aptly called “Jewel on the Rideau”, this Oak has leafed out each spring for over two hundred years, in the wind that blows free over woods and fields south west of the village. The view that it shared with me here is planned to be filled in a very short time with the roofs of houses.

This old Burr Oak, forest-edge fort for generations of children and witness of the history of Manotick is slated for destruction along with three other ancient Oaks and groves of venerable Hickorys and Basswoods.

In respect for the history they have participated in and the biodiversity they help to maintain, these trees must continue to live, with their home intact and enough of the field to give them breathing space. A natural treasure for present and future residents of Manotick.

For more information on Manotick’s battle to save the rural character of their village, see

http://www.ourmanotick.ca/

I have finally finished up my poem, conceived in bits while painting high up on the tree fort platform in the old Burr Oak:

The Burr Oak’s Story

Is two hundred years old if you’re a tree?

Is there enough respect for the elder
To make us pause and consider
In our headlong rush to develop the younger?

Venerable Oak,
The Springtails in the soil about your roots
(and in the hedgerows that bound the field
that has been here for perhaps a hundred years)
- the Springtails
Are each short lived
But of ancient lineage.

Ancient tree,
This is our community.
They call it Biodiversity,
Praising it with words,
Pledging allegiance, then turning around
To pay their friends to pave it over
(you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, and together
we’ll lose our heritage)

The platform of boards is lichened,
The bark of your broad limbs is scuffed by generations
Of tree climbers
Finding lofty solitude, leafy refuge,
A place to share secrets
Sandwiches
Songs
Listen to songs of birds and frogs
In the woods around,
Peek out between high branches
To watch the seasons change as the wind
Blows clean across the field… is it hay this year
Or corn?

I the Painter
Share with those generations of tree climbers a sense
Of the life beneath your rugged bark and wonder
About communities,
How long it takes to develop balance and trust.

A tree will grow where it can find roothold
In a space among its neighbours,
But if too much ground is broken
Too fast,
Without respect for stability
Of community,
Then balance is lost.
Everything changes
In ways that the bulldozer
Can’t predict or imagine.

Elder of Oaks, teach us
As we face global uncertainties
To check our balance,
Listen to the rustle of your leaves,
Feel history in your bark, and
Tread with respect over the intertwined roots
That give this community its character
Its intertwined relationships
Of historic diversity.

A. Karstad
4 June 2008

More news by category Topic -:

Posted in Nature notes, Art, Conservation, plein air paintings | Comments Off

Philomycus togatus, the Toga Mantleslug
May 18th, 2008

Another slug painting, this one I expected to be difficult, as it is deliberately indistinct in pattern - obviously trying to look like a bird dropping, decomposing fungus, or some other bit of organic muck. Philomycus is a forest slug, and there are other species, but in the east we have only togatus.

I found this one resting in the shadow of a well-rotted, mossy branch of White Birch on the forested southeast facing slope just above a newly gravelled laneway leading into a recently surveyed potential cottage lot. Fred is checking a block of four surveyed lots for the presence of Black Rat Snakes on the shore of Big Rideau Narrows, across from Murphys Point Provincial Park, and I accompanied him on his first visit to the site.

The ground was dry, as it has been unseasonably warm and sunny for early May - and I was surprised to find the slug so exposed. It was lying full length but with eye stalks retracted, and when I touched it to see whether it could be roused into activity, it curled itself into a semicircle and lay there inert, looking ever so much like a bird dropping. Its foot is pinkish and its mantle completely covers its body. I spent some time photographing it like that, waiting for it to relax and become active, but it was determinedly shy, so I collected some moss, cedar litter, and a curl of birch bark into a container, transferred the slug, and carried it home, without asking its leave.

It spent a week in the fridge, moving about on and under the moss, and nibbling on a slice of commercial mushroom. I finally got it out to paint, yesterday, and found it not as shy as I’d expected. It crawled all over the curl of birch bark as I held it in my left hand, drawing and painting with my right. When I had to leave my painting I set the bark down in a puddle of water in a glass dish, and covered it with a smaller glass dish.

I noticed that as the slug extends its body to its full 45mm length, the tip of its tail, a smooth grey nub with a midline slit, protrudes from under the posterior end of the mantle. Observed from the side, the pale pinkinsh foot is visible beneath the mantle edge, and it has tiny dots of orange, presumably pores for mucous, which is said to be orange. The eye stalks are stubby and dark blueish gray, becoming black at the tips, and the small, “taster” tentacles by its mouth point downward rather than forward. The mantle is brown, speckled with black (darker near the head), and has two lateral stripes of dark brown, streaked and flecked with black. The texture of the mantle is swirled like fingerprints at the head, and more longitudinally ridged farther back, becoming finer-textured toward the tail. When touched, all mantle texture disappears as the surface is flooded with a clear slime which makes the creature impossible to pick up.

I spent most of the day working with my live Philomycus togatus, first photographing it as it crawled on the bark, then measuring it and drawing it in pencil, then colouring the pencil drawing in watercolour. The highlights of the mantle texture were difficult to portray as distinctly as I would have liked - on such a busily but indistinctly-patterned surface.

Posted in Nature notes, Art, slugs | No Comments »

Lehmania valentiana
April 10th, 2008

Judy collected 15 slugs from beneath flower pots in a Richmond greenhouse on 19 February, for me to paint for the book “Identifying Introduced Land Snails and Slugs in Canada, With a Guide to Native Genera”. I’ve been keeping them in a clear plastic salad box with damp paper towel, crushed eggshell, and romaine lettuce, calling them “my little pigs” for the way they devour the lettuce, turning the heavy-veined leaves into soggy lace, and then lying packed together in clusters like miniature piglets, sleeping it off.

They have also been laying eggs, which you can see glowing like a mass of pearls through their translucent sides - most visible on the right hand side. There are paler and darker individuals. The darker ones appear to be more mottled, and the paler ones show the characteristic “watery tail”. The slime is clear and the breathing hole, or pneumostome, has a pale rim. The best character for identification of this rather nondescript looking slug is the “lyre-shaped” marking on the mantle. We have two immatures, with a pair of very striking pinstripes going down their backs from the rear margin of the mantle to the tail tip.

The individual I have painted is mature, and full of eggs. It is 45mm from head to tail. The smaller dorsal view shows the back pattern of the same animal. Lehmania valentiana used to be called Limax valentiana. It is native to south-western Europe and lives in greenhouses all over the world - a successful “little pig”, and probably highly appropriate for my first watercolour of this project.

Posted in Nature notes, Art, slugs | No Comments »

« Previous Entries