Close Up 5: Sluggish?

We get a weekly delivery of a box of organic vegetables, paying, as many do, a substantial premium to get fruit and veg guaranteed to be free from genetic modification, pesticides and dubious fertilisers. (And you can tell they are because, mostly, they look rather scrawny and weedy compared to what you find on the supermarket shelves.)

While preparing cauliflower cheese today, Rachael came across this natural additive. I promptly took him away to make him a star as my subject for Day 5 of Anni's "CloseUpMacro" challenge.

First surprise: being familiar with how slowly snails move, I can only assume those shells must be seriously heavy. This slug was FAST! Getting him to stay still and pose for a macro shot was not easy - he was always sprinting for the edge of the leaf, and I had to repeatedly pick him up (yuck!) and place him back in the centre. Had the box not been guaranteed organic, I'd have suspected the involvement of performance-enhancing drugs.

I took a couple more shots of him which you can see here, including one I quite liked where you get a slug's eye view of the leaf he's about to sink his <whatever slugs have instead of teeth> into.

To see other participants' shots - and there are some really superb ones - search for the tag CloseUpMacro