These massive pink slugs can grow up to 7.8 inches in length (nearly 20cm) and spend a lot of their time buried in leaf mold which they love the taste of. After dark, or when the rains come down, these things come out of hiding and can be seen in their hundreds apparently, slithering about like slimy milk lollies. They clamber up trees and eat the mosses from the bark and have a gay old time.

Why they are such a colour is still up for debate. Some scientists think that the pink colouring may be because they spend some of their time in beds of red eucalyptus leaves, others think it might just be a quirk of evolution. The colour an animal ends up is generally because of one of two reasons: to blend in, or to show off. Slugs don’t show off to each other because their vision is pretty limited, they don’t really need it whilst they’re munching in the dark. So that leaves option one.

Slugs in gardens and forests are normally pleased to be browny grey poo coloured because that serves them well when it comes to hiding from birds and small mammals. However, up in this remote, mountain forest their list of predators is small, so perhaps there was just no pressure for them to be any specific colour, nature made them pink by mistake and that’s how they remained. A pink slug in my garden would not only fear the attack of the killer starlings, it would fear the attack of my patented salty water gun. Yes, really.

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