The Amazing, Mysterious Slug Continues To Confound

Although slugs probably have been around since dinosaur times, Ingrith Deyrup-Olsen, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Washington, says that many facets of their lives remain a mystery.

Perhaps this is just as well, considering we already know that slugs indulge in sexual orgies in which a single act of copulation lasts up to 36 hours. Equally surprising, slugs sometimes are both male and female, and if no other slug is around they mate with themselves.

Despite its unathletic image, a slug can drop a strong-as-steel rope of slime from a tree branch and slide down, Tarzan style.

What's more, in addition to being prodigious lovers and acrobats, Olsen says slugs are ferocious fighters. Using an odd kind of tongue equipped with about 27,000 teeth, they rasp their prey to death.

Sadly, says the researcher, the prolific and aggressive imported European varieties appear to be routing our native banana slug and driving it into the hills.

Although the utility of both land and sea slugs is limited to basic research, at least one related slimy species, the leech, is being put to work at the cutting edge of high-tech surgery. Reconstructive microsurgeon Marcus Walkinshaw, a former UW professor now in private practice, is one of only about three doctors in the Northwest who occasionally use leeches to promote blood flow in transplanted body tissue. ``In just the past three or four years,'' he says, ``it has

become a fairly well accepted technique for salvaging desperate situations.''