At a meeting that was moving along much faster than normal, a conversation at the end slowed it waaaay down.
“In my office, I actually have a slug infestation,” Nashville Clerk-Treasurer Brenda Young told the Nashville Town Council at its January meeting.
“It’s been happening for a couple years,” she nonchalantly added.
Former Town Hall maintenance man Lamond Martin had been putting down a natural powder to deter them, but that hasn’t kept them away, she said.
Apparently, they come out in the dark, she’s learned. Often, she’ll come in to work in the morning at Town Hall and find slime on her keyboard.
Young, the clerk-treasurer for 33 years, cleans it off and gets back to work.
Lately, they’ve been crawling up the walls and eating her certificates right out of the frames. Nobody would think they’d eat paper, but they are, she said.
As the town’s record keeper, Young draws the line right there.
“The problem is, if something gets in a box in my office and it’s carried into the records vault, then (we are in trouble),” she said.
She believes she knows how they’re getting in: Right through the outside wall.
“Slugs have, like, 27,000 teeth or something. I’ve looked them up online,” she told the council, to a mix of laughs and surprised faces. “So they actually can grind through obviously a lot, so (accounting clerk) Debbie (Ferry) and I took SOS pads, scrub pads and we took the steel wool and we pulled it all apart and tried sticking it down in here where we have an issue, and then we put a cabinet in front of it, and we actually kept the infestation down for a few months.
“Well, they’re back.
“Last night, (former town council member and now maintenance man) Arthur (Omberg) found one when he was cleaning that was a pretty good size,” Young said.
“How big is a pretty good size?” asked town council President Jane Gore.
“He was waving,” Town Administrator Phyllis Carr said.
“It’s like a slugfest,” longtime attorney James T. Roberts observed.
Besides the powder, they’ve tried more than one exterminator over the years with no luck, Young said. Despite that, several of the non-experts around the head table Googled and brainstormed anyway:
Try beer, someone suggested.
Pour salt on them? (They’ve done it.)
How about bringing in some moles?
Ducks like to eat them. “We heard chickens are good, too,” Young added, “but, you know.”
Town Hall staff believe they’re living in a nest/den/whatever you call a slug habitat underground on the east side of the building. Young said maybe the next course of action should be to have someone dig that up and put a barrier in so they can’t come through her wall anymore.
The group decided to call on Brown County Purdue Extension educator Kara Hammes to help them slug it out. Agriculture and natural resources are among her areas of knowledge.
Last week, Hammes said she and Young hadn’t had a chance to connect yet, but she said she’d talked with an insect expert at Purdue and he wasn’t sure that slugs are to blame.
“His whole life is bugs and slugs and understanding and identifying them, and he said, ‘I’ve never heard of that.’ It would be very odd that they would be indoors, and almost unknown that they would be eating paper,” Hammes said. Even though slugs like plant material, and paper comes from trees, it wouldn’t have the nutritional value that plants have, she said.
Her advice to the workers at Town Hall will be to submit a slug-damaged item, like a piece of paper, to the Purdue Plant and Pest Diagnostic Laboratory so that the experts can inspect the pattern. That only costs about $10, she said.
They also could try to trap one of the critters.
If it’s not actually a slug doing the damage, that would explain why other slug-control treatments aren’t working, she said.
“It may sound silly — you think you’d know a slug if you saw it — but there’s all kinds of weird stuff out there,” Hammes said.
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”About slugs” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
From Purdue Extension Entomology:
“Slugs are soft-bodied, grayish or mottled, slimy creatures that can sometimes measure up to 4 inches in length, although most grow to only 1 1/2 inches. Slugs feed on molds and decaying organic matter, but may also feed on the foliage of plants. They must have a large amount of moisture to survive, and they prefer darkness. Ideal habitats include damp basements, beneath boards, trash and other debris, and in crevices. … Excessively rainy and damp weather promotes slug development, especially if temperatures are high.”
Slug control:
- Chemical pesticides metaldehyde or Mesurol (toxic to pets)
- Diatomaceous earth powder
- Eliminate their hiding places
- Sink small pans, canning lids or dishes at least a half-inch deep into the ground at 3- to 4-foot intervals and fill them with beer. This will both attract and drown slugs.
— Purdue.edu publications
[sc:pullout-text-end]
