On turning over a piece of wood, I was delighted to find a leopard slug.  These slugs are native to Europe, but have become common in gardens on the West Coast of the United States.  According to Wikipedia, they mostly eat rotting plant matter and fungi but another site mentions that they eat other slugs so I’m not sure.

The slug was actually too big to fit in the view finder with my MP-E 65 so I settled with taking some pictures of the texture of the slug – which I found rather interesting.

However, there was more than meets the eye with this slug, as I was about to find out when I turned it over.

I decided to turn the slug over to see if I could get some kind of shot of the face, when I was surprised to see tiny mites moving all over it.  There were quite a few of them.

Here’s another shot of them.

Here’s one blown up 200%.

It’s amazing the things you can find on the Internet these days, as a little bit of research was all that was necessary to find out the answer.

These mites are called the trombidiform mite – Riccardoella oudemansi.  They are not beneficial for the slug and pierce its skin to drink the blood.  This particular slug was moving very slowly and I suspect the large number of mites on it was having a bad effect.

From reading through a number of web sites, it seems to be a bit controversial how much of an effect the mites have on the slug.  However, there is some research that indicates 50 mites and above definitely have a negative effect – and this slug certainly had quite a few.

Leopard slugs themselves are quite interesting for the ‘mating dance’ they do.  Two slugs gather together and hang themselves from a branch in a tree with a trail of mucus.

It’s amazing what a simple day’s investigation can bring!

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The experience was more of a learning experience than getting great shots.  The main lesson that I learned was that the flash needs to be compensated for the paper.  As the light meter in the camera strives to expose the image gray, I need to compensate with the flash exposure.  The next time I will try putting it at +1.  Luckily, I take every shot in RAW so I was able to easily adjust the exposure without losing too much of the quality of the shots.  My first attempt was with a millipede that I found.

I would have liked to remove the dirt in the middle of the millipede, but I was worried about hurting it.  While picking the millipede out, I found another little critter that I still need to look up.  Unfortunately none of my shots came out well of it, but this is the best one I could find.  Whatever it was, it was tiny as I needed to take this shot at 5x.

My next victim was a slug.  Here I think for the next time I need to come up with a better background.  Ideally it would be nice to find something that can expose the slime trail. Also, I need to figure out a way to remove the dirt without damaging the slug.

Of course, pill bugs are the easiest to experiment with because they are so plentiful.  I haven’t photographed one in awhile because I have grown rather bored of them, but I decided to get a closeup of this one.

My final experiment of the day was a centipede.  This little bugger was quite tough as they move very quickly and it didn’t like the exposed state of the paper at all.  After convincing it for awhile that it wasn’t about to get off the paper without a few shots it stood still enough for me to get some shots.

Altogether I feel it was a worthwhile experiment.  I will likely try submitting a few of these to the microstock sites- you never know.  The next time though I may try to find some more natural backgrounds like leaves.

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