Slug and Snail Grand National - place your bets

A little bit of patience needed! We are having a new carpet fitted in the sitting room next week so I posted a village WhatsApp message asking if some sturdy folk could help me move furniture into the shed this morning. Six people immediately volunteered. They’ll all want coffee and biscuits and then we’ll have to pick over village gossip so I won’t get out to the garden until this afternoon.

 

Cool!

Happy shifting!

 

THE RESULTS ARE IN







But first an explanation of the experiment for those who are new to the thread. Four weeks ago I put four jam jars in the corners of a raised bed. One had a large teaspoon of marmite mixed with about a third of a jar of hot water. The second had a slurp of molasses (to use that well known scientific measurement) with water added. The third a sprinkling of yeast powder + water. The last a measure of Peroni beer. According to GQT Guinness is best but Peroni was left over from an Italian themed garden party last summer. A roofing slate was very loosely wedged above each jar to keep out the rain.

At the end of each week I counted the slugs and moved the jars one position around the bed. By the end of week four each jam jar had spent one week in each corner. The jam jars were set slightly above soil level to stop beetles etc falling in.

In total I trapped
126 slugs
1 caterpillar
7 woodlice
0 snails.

And the results

1. Marmite 56 slugs ( 44% of total)
2. Molasses 30 (24%)
3. Beer 21 (17%)
4. Yeast 19 (15%)

 

That's an interesting result. I'd assume that the 'yeast extract' used in Marmite is the attractant in that case. Now half the population know what to do with that jar that's been sitting in the cupboard for a decade, while the other half think it's a kind of sacrilege to waste the delicious black paste on slugs!

 

@ViewAhead, don’t feel too bad about getting the results wrong. A good friend of mine in the village is a GQT panellist and he was equally off beam.

 

Disappointed. Thought I had it nailed ... in so far as you can pin down the slithery wotsits.

Ah well. Good trial, @BenCotto. Luckily I did not put any dosh on the outcome.

 

Shame about the lack of snails. I wanted to see what might best attract the voracious version we have here and save my hostas.

 

This is such an interesting experiment. And also curious. Having dispatched over 125 slugs, are the plants in the raised bed ‘untouched’ or have others ignored all options and helped themselves as usual??

 

The bed is largely cleared waiting for the dahlias to be planted. However there are a few verbena bonariensis and also foxgloves neither of which, I think, are on slugs’ dining menus.

 

Certainly John, we have loads and loads of snails. It’s odd.

 

How was the count after each week?
Was there a noticeable drop week on week?
What species of slug was more prevalent week on week?
Was a certain corner preferred across all tests?
Just wondered, tis all!

 

@flounder
Week 1 65
Week 2 34
Week 3 8
Week 4 19

Front right 28
Front left 29
Back right 31
Back left 38

Sorry, I don’t know the slugs’ names. We weren’t introduced.

 

I was asking about weekly figures, as I wanted to see if you'd caught most of them in the first week...which could give skewed figures for the remaining weeks and different baits.
I see you caught nearly twice as many in the first week compared to the second and nearly twice as many from week two to four, was week three a dry week? There appears to be no significant difference between corners.
The species types could differ for preference on bait and time of year regardless of slimy eric/erica letting you know of their presence!
I find this study fascinating...so much so, I'm going to give it a go with roughly the same parameters

 

I’d be interested to hear your findings @flounder . Maybe you could use Guinness instead of Peroni and I read on another forum today that fruit flavoured cider is irresistible to slugs - though maybe only juvenile ones . I meant to follow the excellent suggestion up thread of putting in a decoy trap of clear water but, by the time I found a suitable sized jam jar, the trial was at its mid way point.

Keeping accurate weather records for the duration of the experiment would permit deeper analysis, as would recording which types of slugs.

There was a reference on GQT last week to a trial of different types of beers and their attractiveness to slugs. It would be worthwhile tracking down that episode.