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The Garden Slug

You spent the day pricking out and planting a potential crop of lettuce plants only to find that during the night they have been razed to the ground or reduced to something resembling lace.

The culprit... a Garden Slug

Magnified here 21 times life size, this is a portrait of a likely culprit. During the day slugs and snails hide themselves away in dark, damp crevices but at night they emerge for a vegetarian meal.

Molluscs, to which snails and slugs belong, do not possess mouthparts designed for chewing their food. Instead they have a horny, ribbon-like tongue known as a radula covered with thousands of teeth in rows like those of a file. The radula is used to rasp away at tissues, the debris of which is then ingested and digested making light work of prized plants during the course of an evening.

Shown here magnified 895 times life size are a few of the rasping teeth on a part of a slug's radula. The width of the image in life would measure just over a tenth of a millimetre.