What Are Slugs Good For Supervising Slugs In Your Garden

Slugs and snails occur in gardens during the spring season.Slugs and snails in your garden could lead to some serious problems for your plants. You must strive to get rid of slugs and snails in your garden.Ever seen a gooey, slime-like creature chilling on the grass or leaves in your backyard or a garden? These creatures are called slugs. Snails and slugs are two of the most common pests in gardens.The scientific term for slugs is Gastropoda mollusca, belonging to the kingdom Animalia. Slugs are really very slow and are one of the world’s slowest creatures. Unlike snails, they do not have a hardened shell, but slugs may have a reduced or internal shell to protect their bodies.These creatures produce a certain mucus in order to glide themselves everywhere, the slimy liquid making their commute easier. Slugs and snails look like fat worms, with a brown or gray color and moist texture. They can measure from a 0.8 in (2 cm) up to a whole 10 in (25.4 cm)! They feed on anything from leaves, fruits, and flowers to wet trash, paper, and plant debris, which is the main reason why they become a major nuisance if they reach your carefully honed garden or lovingly grown vegetables. Any area with a moist climate and warm temperatures is enough to attract and breed slugs in numbers. Slugs usually become active at night time, when the temperature is perfect for them. A garden or field slug can usually eat multiple times its body weight and breed at a rapid rate, meaning they can increase in number in a few days if failed to control. Due to their large appetite and large numbers, they take no time to destroy entire fields and gardens. One of the interesting facts about them is that slugs can have up to 14,000 teeth on their radula, which is a tongue-shaped organ that helps them ingest food!Snails come in three different types which are land, sea, and freshwater. They’re similar to slugs, except that they have a hard exterior in the form of a shell to protect them from external conditions. A snail is even eaten as a rare delicacy in many European and African countries. Slugs and snails thrive in moist and damp weather mostly at night, often feeding on the same food their fellow species of slugs do. Apart from being harmless in a non-threatening way, land snails are a great help for gardeners, as they aid in cleaning the rotting and decomposing vegetation by feasting on it. Their feces is rich in nitrogen and minerals, serving as a great fertilizer for the plants around them. Similarly, due to their calcium-rich diet for the purpose of protecting their shells, the animals, snakes, and insects that hunt and eat them are served with a calcium-rich diet. Many birds hunt snails comparatively more during the egg-laying season because snails’ bodies provide the birds with a rich source of calcium, which helps them lay tougher eggs and healthier eggs.Do check out our other articles on where do slugs come from and how do snails reproduce.Are slugs good for fish tanks?There are three different types of snails, one of which is a freshwater or aquatic snail. These snails are mainly put into water tanks with plants and fish to keep the tank clean by eating the algae, decomposing plant waste, dead plants, uneaten fish food, or any other debris which might clog the tank. One species of snail called the Malaysian trumpet snail looks for food by burrowing itself into the gravel at the base of such tanks, effectively keeping the surface clean and algae free and prevents the gravel from hardening.Although a snail can be useful for aquatic gardeners to keep tanks safe and clean, leaving these pests to their own resources to breed and proliferate might not be the best idea. As much as these snails are a great help for you, an excessive amount of them may be an inconvenience and cause problems for you. Snails cannot mass produce unless they have a constant supply or source of food present. If they overpopulate your tank, it can result in burdening the clogged filter pipes. Moreover, these pests add to the biological load in the aquarium along with fishes, as they add to the waste by excreting, breathing, and dying in the tank like other fishes. This can have an adverse effect to the one you expected when you introduced the snails in your tank.Slugs and snails are beneficial as well as harmful for your tank depending on their number and need. If they’re just in the right proportion, they can do wonders and keep your tank healthy and clean. However if left to populate, slugs and snails can become an utter nuisance and destroy it completely. It is important to control the snail population. There are a few methods by which you can control the snail population in your tank.Are snails and slugs good for compost?Slug and snail infestations in your garden break down the organic matter to make compost. Instead of getting rid of slugs and snails by killing them which kills your garden, putting these mollusks in a compost bin could be beneficial for making organic compost. This organic matter is then used to fertilize plants. Snails and slugs which have been added to the compost pit usually do not glide away to other places, as the slugs and snails have everything they need including a warm temperature, moist atmosphere, and loads of waste to eat. Sure, some of the snails and slugs escape, but they enjoy living in this environment.Generally, the compost created from garden slugs is safe to use. You might wonder if spreading it around the trees might spread the slugs too. Usually, garden slugs tend to be attracted towards the waste that is newly added and ignore the waste that is too stale and decomposed of to feed on, which serves as organic fertilizer. The eggs laid by these snails and slugs are picked on by small insects like beetles, frogs, and hedgehogs. If these eggs are not picked on, these eggs decay into the matter due to the pressure of the soil and waste on them, reducing the chances of an infestation. That being said, if you want to get rid of common garden slugs eating away at your compost, there is really no other way but to pick out and get rid of slugs by putting them in soapy or saltwater. Adding pesticide and chemical agents might just aid in killing off the other components which are necessary for forming the organic compost, making it just a heap of waste.As to the question of whether dead slugs and snails in your lawn can make a suitable ingredient for organic compost matter, the answer is yes. These gray-blue pests have moist bodies full of water and slugs and snails do not take a lot of time to decompose and turn into fertilizer for your plants. Tossing them into the compost bin rather than disposing of them would be a much better way to make use of them and keep the cycle of life going on.Are slugs good or bad for your yard?They are both harmful as well as useful. Snails and slugs tend to feed on fruits, flowers, and vegetables and create holes within them and damage them, affecting their growth and edible value and generating a loss for gardeners or farmers. They usually avoid plants that are exposed to a lot of sunlight, as hot weather is not suitable for them. They often come out at night to feed when the weather is cooler and sometimes during the day too if the temperature is favorable.While moving, slugs leave trails. It’s easier to use the trail as a sign and locate them once you can see their trails. Usually, slugs chew up fruits and leave them to feed on. On a lower damage level, slugs and snails make holes in the leaves or fruit, messing up their appearance or edible value in turn. It does not hamper the growth of the whole plant as much as it does on a large scale. If the problem of slugs is left ignored, it can escalate to damage or even worse than just damage, the death of plants from too much destruction.On the other hand, snails and slugs can be extremely beneficial for your lawn if kept in control in a proper way. Even though them eating everything they can get their radula on is an issue, it is also a virtue because slugs and snails can eat literally anything they can get! These common garden pests help to clean up decomposing and decayed waste from plants, animal feces, or any dead animal bodies which may be lying around gardens. Also, slugs and snails are a major source of food for many mammals, birds, and insects. Killing them off may disturb the balance of nature and have adverse effects. The excretions of slugs are rich in nitrogen, a nutrient that helps in the nourishment and healthy growth of plants.How to manage snails and slugs in your garden?If you find shiny trails shining in the sunlight leading up to your plants, then the trails indicate that slugs or snails are active and feeding on your precious plants. This means your plants are at risk of damage from this slug and snail infestation. There are a few natural simple tips and tricks which can help you get rid of these garden pests and also avoid their damage which does not need a lot of money or effort, just some salt or soap, and water.A natural way of preventing a slug and snail infestation is by cleaning your soil of weeds and shrubs will help the sunlight reach your soil and create a dry cover. A slug or snail infestation is often found in areas with moist and damp soil. Dry surface soil and adequate sunlight will prevent garden snails and slugs from reaching the surface to consume your plants. Slugs and snails usually become active during evening and night time, so try to water your plants in the morning, so that by the evening the soil is dry. Avoid overwatering your plants and creating water puddles, which is not just a great place for thriving slugs and snails, but can also damage or kill your plants from excessive watering. Avoid watering the leaves, flowers, and fruits on the plants.Another method to get rid of slugs and snails if they are not in an excessive number is handpicking them from your plants. They can be killed by being drowned in soapy or saltwater immediately. Setting out traps or baits like damp newspapers or baits like cabbage or leaves to attract the slugs into a bottle or a small-mouthed container can help you get rid of slugs. Snails can also be managed effectively this way. You can keep the container (or multiple containers), depending on the infestation in your garden, for a night and get rid of the slugs the next day.Another trick that works is attracting these garden pests with traps or baits like beer or a solution of yeast and water into a bottle. Slugs or snails are attracted to the strong odor and drown in the liquid while trying to drink. Put out the bottle for one night or more, depending on the infestation, and discard it the next day.Another tip that works when you have tall plants with thick trunks is to attach copper rings around these trees so that the slugs and snails cannot climb up them. Copper is said to react with the slimy liquid secreted by slugs and snails, which gives them something close to electric shocks when they try to climb, preventing them from climbing higher than the copper ring. Other measures include bringing in animals into action that prey on the garden snail to eradicate them. Animals like snakes, toads, hedgehogs, a few beetles, and many birds, including ducks eat these slugs, which can help you when eradicating them from your precious garden.There are a few other methods to eliminate this pest that are not usually recommended because they involve chemical pesticides like iron phosphate pellets. If the damage is getting high, then it might be time to make use of them. Iron phosphate acts as a poison to kill a garden snail and slug when they consume it. This is not only harmful to slugs, but also harms other living beings like dogs, if they wandered into your lawn and consumed it. Make sure to keep your dogs and other pets away. Other methods include using etaldehyde and ferric sodium which can damage your fruit and plant. However, this can put the animals that eat these slugs at risk because it could affect their health after consuming infected slugs.As we discussed earlier the pros and cons of snail breeding in your tank to keep it clean, there could be instances where you never expected snails to emerge in your tank, or where you did put them there yourself, but you can see them growing in numbers and are not able to control it. It is really important to control it. Here are a few methods to avoid damage and control the infestation of snails in your aquarium tank.Overfeeding your fish can result in most of it being left behind in the tank, ready for hungry snails scouring for every particle of food to eat. Slugs and snails eat what they can get their hands on. Snails breed rapidly in perfect conditions where they have an abundant food supply. The nutrition from fish food may give the snails enough energy to breed between themselves and produce more and more of them. Cleaning up the algae gathering on the surface of the water or in the tank from time to time can help stop an infestation. The ubiquitous algae can provide a nutritional food source for snails, in turn proliferating their numbers. Likewise, cleaning excess debris like plant and soil waste gathering in the tank occasionally can help cut out the food source of these snails from the root. Changing the water in your tank on a weekly or a fortnight basis helps keep the biological load like excreta, bacteria, and other waste in your tank away from the snails as well as your fish, stopping their food resource and keeping the tank water fresh and clean for the fish. Setting up traps in a bottle similar to slug baits can also help get rid of the pest all at once.If the population of snails looks on the rise, adding new creatures to the tank that prey on these little mollusks is recommended. There is a species of snails named Assassin snail that preys on other snails and devours them. Although, these creatures might harm not just the snails, but also the fish that reside in the tank. Precaution is extremely important while choosing which creatures you add to your tank, and be aware if they start killing off the ones they’re not supposed to. Apart from that, goldfishes and green spotted pufferfishes also enjoy munching on those hard crunchy shells! Bringing in these fishes can drastically reduce the number of snails in your tank.Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly facts for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for what are slugs good for then why not take a look at how many teeth do snails have or slug facts.

Slugs and snails occur in gardens during the spring season.