Hybrid '˜super-slugs' are invading British gardens and we can't stop them

This is a hybrid between a Spanish stealth slug and the UKs common black slug,

The Daily Mail calls it a 'slime wave'. The Sun calls them 'an army'. Either way, both papers have reported 500 billion slugs are set to invade British gardens, after a mild winter created perfect breeding conditions.

So is the UK really about to be overwhelmed by slimy slugs? The simple answer is no, but there could be something far worse in store.

Headline numbers alone aren’t necessarily something to get in a lather over. A typical garden can contain several thousand slugs, and the “500 billion” figure is derived from estimates of maximum numbers per area. In any case, slug numbers can rise and fall a great deal across time and space, in natural cycles, and even astonishingly dramatic increases are not always cause for concern. Like waves crashing against a beach, the rise is often transient and local – usually slug numbers will drop back to normal, with the disturbance hardly noticed beyond a few local gardeners.

What is more problematic is the progressive, sustained and perhaps less spectacular rise in numbers which, tsunami-like, is maintained for far longer, and spreads widely throughout the countryside. This is Britain’s real slug invasion. So what can we do about it?

Spanish slug (Arion vulgaris) invasion in garden

The trigger seems innocuous enough in isolation: a few non-native slugs from continental Europe have accidentally been introduced. Several of these species have close relatives in the UK, so similar in fact that only specialists can tell them apart, and they can interbreed freely. Of course, many animals can create hybrids without presenting a threat, but what makes slugs different – and these hybrids so worrying – is their interesting and deviant sex lives.

Slugs are hermaphrodites, which means the same individual exists as both sexes; they first develop as males, before experiencing a true hermaphrodite phase to become female. This means they can dispense with normal mating requirements, and this is where the consequences of “La difference” between British and continental species becomes significant.

Why British slugs are different

When slugs colonised the UK after the last ice age, they found an island recently covered with ice sheets, where the biological diversity remained poorer than continental Europe. In these circumstances, the ability to self-fertilise was a good evolutionary strategy, one which ensured reproduction even when slug populations were devastated by harsh weather.