Our mushroom or fungal fruit is no more than the apple on a mycelium tree, a vessel for maturing reproductive spores. The filamentous hypae, delicate white threads beneath the ground are the plant itself, busily recycling nutrients, converting leaves of the past into food for the future.
The banana slug is a handsome beast when viewed on an eye to eye level. Its rasping radular mouth scrapes at one's skin like the tongue of a cat. Primitive eyes on the ends of stalks peer forward and back or to both sides, independent of where its partner's gaze lies. Tasting and touching, sensory tentacles outline the mouth like a handsomely waxed mustache. A mantle or hood could protect from the rain, as a wide brimmed hat, but a hat with a hole for the nose to fit through if it had a nose at all. Instead a broad pneumostome, a hole, always on the left, opens and closes with each inhale or exhale. This hood is a cape as well hiding the parts that could reveal the hermaphroditic nature of this snail with no shell. The rest of the body, the muscular foot contracts and relaxes in well controlled waves propelling the six inch creature forward at the galloping rate of 30 feet per hour. The route is lubricated by a sticky slim, fluid when calm and viscous when threatened. Its niche here in the filtered light on a mossy green carpet is to decompose, to recycle mushrooms or scat or leaves or whatever.
Today we walked once more through the forest, this time on Cortes Island, Desolation Sound. Karen Copeland, Naturalist
