{"id":22588,"date":"2018-09-04T11:37:44","date_gmt":"2018-09-04T15:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=22588"},"modified":"2018-09-04T11:37:44","modified_gmt":"2018-09-04T15:37:44","slug":"the-unwanted-and-uncalled-for-sequel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2018\/09\/the-unwanted-and-uncalled-for-sequel\/","title":{"rendered":"The unwanted and uncalled-for sequel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a follow-up video to a series of still images that I took five years ago, and I realized right as I was finishing the editing that I missed the anniversary date by only a couple of days. I couldn&#8217;t have posted on the precise day anyway, because my video account has a weekly limit and I&#8217;d exceeded it with the previous offering.<\/p>\n<p>And I probably shouldn&#8217;t be posting this anyway. I went out late one night, or early one morning if you like being pedantic, casually looking around with the headlamp, and happened across my subjects here. The behavior wasn&#8217;t typical, leading me to believe that something might be about to happen, so I quickly fetched the Canon T2i, video light, and mini-tripod. This took all of five minutes or less, but I missed the opening of Act One. I shot most of the rest in detail, then switched to the second pair of subjects and captured the entire sequence with them &#8211; timing was on my side in that regard, since they could have easily started while I was occupied with the first couple.<\/p>\n<p>Why am I being so vague, you ask? Because it&#8217;s a lot more fun this way. Without further ado, I present the video to let you find out the hard way what I&#8217;m talking about.<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align:center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/288107564\" width=\"720\" height=\"540\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p><br clear=\"all\"\/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2013\/08\/booger-nights\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">The previous experience with exactly this subject can be found here<\/a>, and I&#8217;m quite proud of both the title and the writing therein, which tells you far too much about me. For the record, these are leopard slugs (<em>Limax maximus<\/em>,) and yes, they&#8217;re huge. And very fond of brick too, so it&#8217;s paramount that one watches the front steps when going out at night. I have a wicked tendency to go barefoot in the summer, but these humongous bastards have almost broken me of that habit.<\/p>\n<p>I have to note that I did a bit of web searching to try and determine more details about what was captured here, but didn&#8217;t turn up a lot. And I was unwilling to delve into it further because, you know, such searches are being saved, cataloged, and examined for &#8220;national security&#8221; and all that rot &#8211; I didn&#8217;t want to appear <em>fanatical<\/em> or anything. Trust me, this is all academic, detached observational kind of thing<strong>;<\/strong> I&#8217;m not especially motivated to pursue such subjects. No, really. But I&#8217;ll admit it&#8217;s kinda annoying to have this whole webbernets thing and then feel self-conscious about actually <em>using<\/em> it. Like, is there a better technical term for that blue thing, even though most sources call it a penis? That seems kind of sexist to me &#8211; it should be a vaginis to me, but is there a proper Latin term? And what&#8217;re those white blobs being discarded? Probably not condoms, I&#8217;m guessing&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, I could have sworn I posted some of these photos back when I took them, but can find no record of it either within the blog or in the published images folders, so I guess we take care of it here.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/SlugEggs1.jpg\" alt=\"cluster of invertebrate eggs, likely leopard slug Limax maximus\" width=\"750\" height=\"491\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-22592\" \/><br clear=\"all\"\/>Back in 2012, before my first experience with bumping sluglies, I found this cluster of eggs underneath a crate in the side yard. At this point of course, no details could be discerned at all, so I couldn&#8217;t be sure what they were.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/SlugFetus.jpg\" alt=\"closeup image of developing fetus through transparent eggshell, likely leopard slug Limax maximus\" width=\"750\" height=\"518\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-22593\" \/><br clear=\"all\"\/>I checked back on them as they were developing, and despite getting really lucky with the lighting, didn&#8217;t get enough detail from the fetus to even give an idea of what they were. &#8220;Caspar&#8221; would be my best guess based on the appearance, but I don&#8217;t think ghosts are hatched from eggs &#8211; they&#8217;re probably live-born. Or dead-born. Whatever.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/ItsABoyGirl.jpg\" alt=\"hatching slugs likely leopard slug Limax maximus\" width=\"750\" height=\"602\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-22594\" \/><br clear=\"all\"\/>Not much later on, the mystery was solved to a reasonable degree, especially given the size of the eggs and the cluster thereof &#8211; there&#8217;s probably no other species that could produce the sheer mass. Each individual egg was about 5mm across, if memory serves, which doesn&#8217;t seem too significant until you sum up a few dozen<strong>;<\/strong> it certainly wasn&#8217;t a typical garden slug that weighed about the same as three of the eggs. So I&#8217;m pretty comfortable saying that, yes, someplace not far away there will be, if there isn&#8217;t already, a cluster or four very similar to these. Should I go looking for them? It&#8217;s your call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a follow-up video to a series of still images that I took five years ago, and I realized right as I was finishing the editing that I missed the anniversary date by only a couple of days. I couldn&#8217;t have posted on the precise day anyway, because my video account has a weekly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4,3,3809],"tags":[4530,4533,1930,1931,4531,4532,1932],"class_list":["post-22588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-nature","category-photo","category-video","tag-i-didnt-want-to-see-it-in-motion-thank-you-very-much","tag-invertebrate-voyeur","tag-leopard-slug","tag-limax-maximus","tag-phlegm-zeppelin","tag-slug-orgy","tag-slug-sex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}