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| You can see the snail's slime trail lower right. |
I took another look at the Nasturtiums yesterday. In fact I positioned a garden chair next to them so that I could have a proper look. Unlike the day before, there were no Small White caterpillars in sight, but there were a few snail trails. It was not long before I noticed the tiny snail in the photo above. Its shall was considerably smaller than my little fingernail.
I know incredibly little about snail identification. Certainly the spire was very flattened (a contradiction in terms, it seems to me!), which might suggest a species similar to Oxychilus cellarius, though the body is not the typical blue-grey.
There was also a cluster of yellow eggs, which I imagined would belong to the Small Whites ... I flipped the leaf over gently for a couple of photographs and let go afterwards.
... however, a bit of research showed that Small Whites lay single eggs. Large Whites lay clusters at the rate of four eggs a minute, so I think these are Large White butterfly eggs.
As I made my way back to the house, I noticed this Cranefly checking out (or perhaps 'checking in to') one of our insect hotels ...
... I'm not sure how well it would fit through the bamboo holes!
4 comments:
The butterfly eggs are beautiful!
The snail identification course i went on didn't help me with snails at all, we were thrown too much into the deep end and snails to me just aren't as fascinating as say caterpillars or hoverflies
Hello Caroline, I like the cute snail and the cranefly is cool. Neat sighting of the tiny eggs. Great photos, have a happy day!
cranefly are everywhere at the moment, I believe the Daily Express ran a story about them. Makes a change from Diana, or immigration.
We don't have snails. I have seen them at work at my brother's place in California and I don't think I would be glad to have them in my gardens.
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