Slugs as Mycophagists. A. H. R. Buller. 277 
Experiment I. At my father’s house at Birmingham, England, 
there is a smooth, well-compressed, gravel carriage-way which 
is oval in form, 40 ft. wide and 60 ft. long. On a border, at the 
edge of the gravelled area, one evening in August as darkness 
was setting in, I found an expanded Phallus upon which a slug, 
Limax maximus, was feeding. I removed the slug and set the 
fungus upon the gravel at a distance of 10 ft. from the edge of 
the border. The next morning I found that a slug had visited 
the fungus upon the gravel, and the slime-track revealed that 
the slug had come from the border where | had first found the 
fungus with a slug feeding upon it. The track was very direct 
from the border to the fungus. It therefore appeared that the 
Phallus had attracted the slug chemotactically for a distance 
of at least ro ft. 
Experiment II. Shortly after making the above experiment, 
on August 28, 1920, I visited Sutton Park, Warwickshire, and 
there procured nine large Phallus balls from under a Holly bush. 
The balls were full-grown, but still quite odourless; and their 
stipes were beginning to elongate, for I could feel them in some 
of the balls pressing upwards against the top of the peridium. 
I took the balls home to my father’s garden, planted them in 
damp soil in pots, and set the pots in the greenhouse. Two days 
afterwards, one of the balls opened and a tall stipe covered 
with a strongly odorous dark-green cap emerged. In the evening 
I set the expanded Phallus in the middle of the gravelled area. 
Next morning I found that the fungus had been visited by a 
slug which, as indicated by its slime-track, had crept over the 
gravel for a distance of about 21 ft. 
Experiment III. The other Phallus fruit-bodies opened one 
by one, and with them I made several other experiments like 
the one just described. In one of them a slug came at night 
about 24 ft. over the gravel to two fruit-bodies which were in 
one pot, ate a piece out of each of the two stipes, and then 
crept between the bottom of the pot and the gravel. When I 
raised the pot in the morning, in order to take it to a place where 
the Bluebottle flies could not eat up all the green slime, [ found 
the slug beneath. The slug was kindly identified for me by 
Mr P. T. Deakin as Limax maximus var. obscura. 
On three other nights I placed pots with expanded Phallus 
fruit-bodies in the middle of the gravelled area, but no slugs 
visited them. This may have been due in part to the paucity 
of slugs in the borders and in part to the weather being rainy 
and windy. The successful experiments were performed on still 
nights. Slime tracks were only found in the morning upon 
the gravel when a slug had visited a Phallus during the previous 
night. 
