Slugs, slugs and more slugs!

[Poly]

Almost all outdoor plants are dead or dying now, for the past week it has been diping below the freezing mark where I live.

Decided to go outside today and collect some slugs for the winter! In about 5 min, I had over 50 of them

I have them in a 1 Gallon kritter keeper, soil substrate and I feed them lettuce apples and oranges. EDIT: I can't believe how these things eat!!! I just went to check, and half the lettuce is already gone!

Their very easy to keep, and my toads love them!






Added some more food:

[frogluver]

That's great Royce !! It sucks that I couln't find any when I was looking for some :-P!!!

[BG]

Thats great Royce. Hope you get to breed them. Its like you started a slug culture.lol Good food for winter.

[Poly]

That's great Royce !! It sucks that I couln't find any when I was looking for some :-P!!!

Thanks Yeeah, too bad, well a great alternative is nightcrawlers, why don't you get some of those?

Thats great Royce. Hope you get to breed them. Its like you started a slug culture.lol Good food for winter.

Haha, thanks, can't imagine bredding slugs... wonder how they breed & lay eggs??? lol Yup, gotter' right there, a "slug culture"

[Poly]

BTW guys, I am ordering first thing Monday morning 300 Canadain Nightcrawlers and 250 Meal worms for 58.06 taxes in AND shipping inc. in the price!!! Awesome price IMO! Can't wait to get my night crawlers in, set up a small night stand for them, I'll get pics...

[frogluver]

Thanks Yeeah, too bad, well a great alternative is nightcrawlers, why don't you get some of those?
Haha, thanks, can't imagine bredding slugs... wonder how they breed & lay eggs??? lol Yup, gotter' right there, a "slug culture"

Nightcrawlers, i.e. earthworms, cause a lot of problems for Wood frogs.....at least from what I've observed over the past 7 years. For some odd reason, they caused all my Woodies to either upchuck or have diarrhea. :P

That was actually going to be a question of mine lol....How do you go about breeding slugs?

[JeffreH]

My only concern with using slugs as a feeder would be potentially carrying parasites; it might be best to wait until you have an F2 generation of slugs to separate from the primary group you collected to begin actually feeding to your frog. Then again, I don't know that much about slugs specifically, (more their cousins) - they may not be prone to carrying bad stuff within them. Honestly - a healthy animal should be able to combat anything that may present itself to begin with, but as a precaution for common practice in captivity, we usually opt to avoid feeding the unknown.

That being said - those slugs should reproduce for you "fairly" quickly, especially if you have so many of them at your immediate disposal. They are hermaphrodites, and if they are like some other gastropods they probably copulate to reproduce but are fully capable of reproducing with themselves to lay their eggs. I have no idea what species you have so I can't be certain as to how quickly they can reproduce, but mature garden slugs of the typical pest species can lay eggs every 2-3 months in varying quantites (often HEFTY quantities). The rate at which these eggs hatch can vary dramatically depending on how damp you keep them and the temperature you are keeping them in. Slugs like things on the cooler side [~65 degrees]; but eggs hatch faster if kept a little warmer.

Honestly, if you keep them damp and provide plenty of food they should breed on their own for you. I'd keep a constant supply of fresh salad items available, a good substrate, and some dead wood probably couldn't hurt to increase surface area and for them to munch on(nothing with excessive phenols). I think the setup that the OP has would probably be sufficient to culture them. Hopefully someone with actual slug experience can help, I'm just drawing my ideas from research on prevention in my garden and some snail stuff I'm familiar with.