Jack Knox: Highs and lows of a career soaked in slug slime

I stepped on a banana slug barefoot the other day — to clarify, it was I who was barefoot, though I suppose the slug was, too — which made me think of Donovan Saul.

Saul is — or was — the Banana Slug King of Thetis Island.

A biological collector, someone who under government licence collects specimens for education and scientific research, Saul actually had a catalog of 40 items for sale, not just slugs.

Most of what Saul collected was marine life plucked from the saltchuck as he plied the west side of Georgia Strait in his six-metre boat: jellyfish, whelks, hermit crabs, scale worms, anemones and the sexily named warty sea squirt. Occasionally, he’d range over to the west coast of the Island for gooseneck barnacles or giant sand fleas the size of cigarette butts.

For some reason, though, it was the banana slugs that made Saul famous — that stuck to him, as it were.

He’d search for them in low, damp, fern-covered areas, or on the side of the road after the grass was cut, or in the garbage dump after it rained.

Knowing of Saul’s quest, his Thetis Island neighbours kept slug buckets. Kids would bring slugs to him.

Saul would immerse them (the slugs, not the kids) in a concoction that would anesthetize and kill them. Each would be injected with a preservative before being shipped (by snail mail, of course) to U.S. biological-supply companies, the ones that provided university science labs with everything from frogs to human cadavers.

The slugs weren’t Saul’s most lucrative product (he’d sell maybe 1,000 a year, at 50 cents US apiece) but they were the gooiest, impregnating his clothes with a thick mucus that proved impossible to get out.

That’s what most of us think of when thinking of slugs: destructive creatures that spread slime wherever they go and sometimes get elected president. Here in the City of Gardens, the poky predators fill even the most Dalai Lama-ish of residents with the kind of lip-curling fear and loathing that people in other cities reserve for thieves, telephone scammers and street mimes. Some pour salt on them. Some cut them in half with scissors. Some lure them into containers half-filled with beer, which the slugs drink before climbing into their little slug cars and driving into one another.

They aren’t even good to eat. (Longtime readers might remember the alarm/revulsion they felt in 2001 when it was reported that a Tahsis family, hard-hit by the forestry downturn, had taken to frying slugs.) Like the appendix, throw pillows or Montreal traffic cops, slugs have no apparent purpose.

The thing is, not appearing to have a purpose is not the same as not having a purpose. Researchers get quite excited about unlocking the secrets of slug slime to, potentially, find treatments for cystic fibrosis, infertility and ulcers. Sticky yet elastic, it could lead to a better medical glue. In the olden days, Indigenous people spoke of its analgesic properties. A TC letter writer swore it eased his psoriasis. There’s even talk that the chemical messages that slugs leave in slime trails — telling other slugs what direction they’re taking, even identifying their gender — could one day lead to the creation of fast, powerful, chemically based computers.

Saul won’t be part of it, though. He has moved on from biological collecting. Diving into the depths, getting stung by jellyfish, sticking his hands with sea urchin spines that never come out, searching log booms for sea gooseberries — it’s a young man’s game.

He misses it, though. “It was hands-on biology,” he said the other day from Thetis Island. His daily commute, which consisted of descending the stairs from his waterfront home to his boat on the water, sure beat the Colwood Crawl.

He still has no time for black arion slugs. They’re an invasive species that don’t belong here (probably claiming to be in Canada “on their way to Alaska”).

Saul has a soft spot for our native green slugs, though. “If I see one, I try not to hurt it. If they’re in the way, I pick them up and move them so they don’t get hurt.”

Beauty is in the eye, or perhaps the toes, of the beholder.

jknox@timescolonist.com