Per wrote:You know in most ways, a warmer climate is not all that bad for Sweden, but one drawback of the milder winters we've had the last twenty years or so, is an increase in the number of ticks, but also the invasion of the Spanish slug, or "killer slugs" as we call them.
They're not killers as in killer bees, the name comes from them being cannibalistic, so you can often see one of them eating a weaker compadre... Anyway, they're bigger, uglier and more repulsive looking than traditional Swedish slugs, they multiply like crazy (being adapted to the Iberic peninsula and its dry climate they lay hundreds of eggs in the hope that at least some may actually hatch, but in the moister Northern Europe - they all do. ) and completely devestate gardens. They have no natural enemies here. Apparently the musk duck eats them, but that's about it.
Now that it's spring and I ride my bike to work there are scores of them crawling all over the bike lanes.
Some squashed, others not, but all of them equally disgusting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_slug
Still haven't seen any in our garden. Maybe the hedgehogs take care of them? We have two of them living there, a male living under a dutchman's pipe in front of the house and a female living under the playhouse in the backyard. Now during spring the two of them socialise quite a bit in the evenings, some summers we have "hoglets", but the rest of the year they tend to each stay in their designated half of the garden... Anyway, hedgehogs eat slugs, but I've often heard people say that they don't like the Spanish ones. Maybe ours do?
Hey Per here in the UK gardeners use beer as bait in slug traps, it seems they love the taste and an inch of the stuff in a shallow pan or container works great as a death trap for them to drown in... as traps go it seems like a helluva way to die