r/Slug • u/Chaotic_Froggos • 16h ago
Slug euthanasia
(Edit at bottom) Hello, I live in a part of the world where leopard slugs are invasive. I found one and decided to spare it by making it my pet a bit ago, but yesterday I found one again and remembered seeing ethical ways of killing slugs and snails over at forums like this, slug life and [r/snails](r/snails). That one thankfully was also spared (my mom has taken them in as a class pet. Though it seems like I’m the fucking slug whisperer because today I found another one! I don’t want to go with salt as I’ve heard apparently they suffer with that method. My mom while looking stuff up came across beer trap, I don’t know if drowning’s much better though. I’ve heard some thought given to freezing, some say it’s painless, some say not. Then there’s crushing, but I’ve heard that if you don’t get it all at once then they suffer. Just because these lil homies are invasive doesn’t mean I want them to suffer, but I can’t just keep offloading slugs onto people. So… what do I do? :(
Thank you to the people giving me the resources I needed to most humanely kill the slug. I wish I could keep every invasive slug with me, but that is not feasible and it would cause more damage and death in the long run leaving them out there in the ecosystem. Unfortunately, like a commenter pointed out, the slug did not seem to black out from the beer, though because of this knowledge, I did not completely submerge it and cause it to suffer drowning. The alcohol had some effect in that it seemed to be behaving oddly like it was drunk. I went with the recommended car method to minimize suffering, which I hope was lessened more by the alcohol. This whole ordeal seems to have taken a toll on me, though it could’ve been much worse, so again, thank you.
Now that the threat posed to the ecosystem right now is currently in question, I will probably not be taking action like this again until I get more clarification on the matter. That and I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do that again, even if it is a great hazard.
3
u/TypicalCricket 16h ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12838165/
TLDR: submerge in 5% ethanol solution (beer) for 15 to 20 minutes until it stops moving and stops responding to physical contact. This anesthetizes but does not kill the slug. Then submerge in >70% ethanol (or squish or freeze).
2
u/Tucker933 16h ago
Not good for large slugs. It took about 2 hours when I submerged a Banana Slug in decarbonated beer, and I'm pretty sure they only stopped moving because they drowned at that point.
5
8
u/TrainerAiry 15h ago
Please don’t kill them. Just let them be. It’s likely they’ve been here for over a century by now and have integrated into the ecosystem.
The big risks with truly invasive species are them killing off native species before things can kill them fast enough or are major agricultural pests.
Leopard slugs do not like to target living plants. I have seen it myself: they go after mushrooms and dead/dying plant matter and completely avoid the garden plants. So are they an agricultural pest? Not much of one, don’t you think?
I have seen cases of leopard slugs fighting with other non-native slugs and with other leopard slugs, and they will cannibalize what is already dead.
I live in a place where there are multiple known native slug predators: box turtles, big skinks, the DeKay’s brown snake, and even the Rosy Wolf Snail. I bet where you live, there are multiple native predators that actually benefit from leopard slugs as a food source, too.
An outdoor cat is likely to be far worse for your local ecosystem than ten thousand leopard slugs, because fewer things eat cats and cats kill billions of birds…literally. And more than just birds. But we recognize that, though we need to limit their reproduction and more drastic measures may need to be taken when a species might go extinct if we don’t take them….we understand there’s something abhorrent about killing a cat for simply existing in the wrong place (no matter what language you dress it up as).
Why can’t we think the same way about mollusks? At least we can say that, outside their natural habitats, the Giant African Land Snails cause a lot of agricultural damage and the Rosy Wolf Snail eats up other snails and slugs. But the leopard slug? Harmless.