Monthly list fiction: Macrogastropoda of the Pacific Southeast (Patreon)

Monthly "list format" fiction - I was calling it "creepypasta" but not all of it is really going to be horror.

----Macrogastropoda of the Pacific Southeast----

The Pacific Southeast is a geographical region in eastern North America characterized by a narrow strip of mudforest spanning the coast from roughly the snow-capped mountains of Southern Florida down to the subtropics of Northern Utah. The dense sphagnum mats of the Greater Eastern saltbog separate the acidic waters of the shallow pacific sea from the freshwater oak swamps that characterize much of this region, while the glacial shelves of the Carolinas halt the encroachment of the Midwestern maize barrens and the kudzu of the Southern tanglesea. Thousands of species of flora and fauna are endemic to this unique habitat, dominated at all trophic levels by terrestrial molluscs.

DOCUMENTED SPECIES OF INTEREST:

"Drop Slug" (Ariolimax planata): Also known as the cave ray and gluemoth, this translucent, predatory mantleslug is roughly 60cm in length and 1.4 meters in width when fully outstretched, its wide kite-shaped body less than 3cm thick at its center. An ambush predator, it clings upside-down to surfaces waiting to release itself and drop on passing prey, secreting a large volume of slime that expands rapidly on contact with air into a glutinous froth. The slug is known to supplement its diet with toxic fungi, rendering frothy substance lethal to prey that is not outright asphyxiated. Drop slugs prefer to hunt where they can avoid light, but several subspecies camouflage their exposed surface with a layer of detritus.

"Vampire Slug" (Laevicaulus dracularia): This small (15-35cm) shell-less pulmonate has a broad, extremely flattened body known to mimic the shape and texture of a decaying leaf from over 12 species of endemic oak, evidently determined by the diet of herbivorous juveniles. By maturity, these slugs feed solely on the bodily fluids of larger animals through a thin, sharp proboscis that can extend up to 9x the length of the body, which itself may distend with up to half a liter of fluid in a single feeding. Vampire slugs form large colonies among the litter of host trees and obtain much of their diet from the blood of larger gastropod grazers, but are thought to be one of the primary reasons for the lack of warm blooded vertebrate fauna on the forest floor.

"Riverhog" (Aplysia amphibius): The largest of the river hares, this freshwater to brackish nudibranch reaches a maximum recorded length of 5 meters, though three meter specimens are more common. They are largely unaggressive, but as opportunistic omnivores they may pose a threat to injured, sick or trapped prey and have demonstrated an attraction to the smell of blood.

"Moss Nettle" (Limacicantha irritans): This medium sized (48cm) dome-shaped slug is thickly covered in soft, conical papillae housing smooth, calcerous needles thin enough to penetrate unprotected skin, introducing bacterial toxins known to trigger acute urticaria in human subjects or even anaphylactic shock and hemorrhaging in extreme cases. Seldom preyed upon, it spends most of its adult life nearly sedentary on its host tree, slowly rotating to graze on fast-growing epiphytic algae. Individuals exhibit warning coloration ranging from yellow to crimson with an intense orange being the most common, though an isolated population restricted to colder mountaintops is well camouflaged as a clump of moss. The larger white tree nettle or "dizzyslug," only recently identified as its own subspecies, lacks bacterial toxins of its own but concentrates the psilocybin of the endemic "bloody bones" fungus (Hydnellum cubensis), its sting consequently carrying a dangerously intense hallucinogenic effect.

"Tangleslug" (Melibe serpentia): A terrestrial leonid nudibranch reaching lengths of up to seven meters, though most of the serpentine body is under half a meter thick. Leaflike appendages line its body in pairs, each up to a meter in length, and the bulbous head is as much as 1.5 meters wide at rest. Its coloration and texture are indistinguishable to the naked eye from an oak branch dense with lichen, even its slime matching the coloration and density of epiphytic cyanobacteria. When the slug detects prey, its oral hood can expand to 600% its width, functioning as an adhesive net lined with a numbing toxic gel.

"Night Dagger" (Conus phantasma): This nocturnal, terrestrial conoid snail has a maximum shell length of 72cm, though this is concealed in living specimens by a thick black mantle covered in long, thin papillae. The snail moves slowly, but relies on stealth and ambush to hunt even significantly faster, stronger prey with its complex venom, a mix of over a hundred identified toxins injected via a harpoon-like radula. Envenomation is capable of paralyzing a mature bearsloth in under fourteen seconds, and instantaneous heart failure in human explorers. Once prey is incapacitated or dead the snail feeds at liesure and may continue scavenging a larger carcass for several days.

"Earthwinder" (Testacella vermiformis): this fossorial semislug has a narrow, almost serpenting body up to 6 meters in length, tapering to only 15 cm in width towards the anterior end and swelling to 42cm in width at its posterior, which is protected by a flat, rounded shell. Lacking eyes or pigmentation, it worms through soft soil and mud until it detects the vibrations of such common prey as stiltfowl, moss rats or elephants, erupting from the substrate and coiling around prey in a single powerul motion. Its adhesive slime makes escape difficult as it continues to coil around the victim, killing by asphyxiation.

"Giant Rotback" (Philomycus mephitidae): reaching up to three meters in length, this roughly dome shaped mantleslug is characterized by a veined, pale blue upper surface and a large dorsal cavity lined with bright red tissue. This cavity smells strongly of decaying meat, attracting scavenging insects and other corpse fauna. The purpose of this lure is not for the direct benefit of the slug itself, but to provide food for the social horsefly, Tabanus limacophilus, an obligate mutualist of P. mephitidae. Larvae of the fly are dependent on a diet of the slug's mucous secretions, while adults prey opportunistically on insects and the blood of larger animals. These insects respond aggressively to moving objects within a five meter radius of their "home slug" and will repeatedly bite regardless of dietary need until the agitator has retreated.

"Pit Slug" (Myxolima insidiae): This grey-green slug seldom exceeds 22cm in length and spends most of its development a solitary omnivore, but a mature slug will follow scent trails to join breeding colonies that may number in the thousands. These colonies form subsurface aggreggations camouflaged beneath as little as an inch of loose soil, and the buried mass maintains a hollow center. Prey as lightweight as swamp hares easily fall through the delicate roof of this "slug pit," suffocating quickly in the slimy mass of carnivorous molluscs.

"Glass Ghost" (Pterotrachea charybidis): A fully aquatic river snail reaching lengths of eight meters from the tip of its flexible, tubular trunk to its long, flattened tail. Its large, unstalked eyes are highly sophisticated, providing nocturnal binocular vision, and protrude just above the surface of the water as it hunts. Its transparent body is virtually invisible when submerged, its relatively tiny, white shell and opaque digestive tract easily mistaken for a small fish. The laterally flattened tail easily propels the animal at startling speeds even against the river's current, and a powerful sucker-like pad on the end of the trunk assists the finely barbed and powerful radula in ensnaring prey.

"Mud Fairy" (Clione candiru): Inhabiting murky, slow-moving waters, this freshwater Clionid is approximately 12cm in length and capable of swimming rapidly with its two flipper-like fins. Attacking larger prey such as riverhogs, glass ghosts and unsuspecting waders, a ring of muscular, barbed tentacles allow the animal to grip tissue surfaces while a set of highly adapted, almost jaw-like opposing radulae quickly carve out a circular plug of flesh, earning them the colloquial name "melon-baller slug."

UNCONFIRMED SPECIES:

"Titan Tree-mimic:" allegedly a predator capable of imitating a fully grown swamp oak, holding its body vertically aloft before bringing its "canopy" of oral tentacles down on passing prey. Its false leaves are said to imitate the bioluminescence of the local swamp oak glowworm, but that these lights blink in too uniform a pattern compared to the real insects in surrounding treetops. The alleged height of this gastropod would defy physical law without an internal skeletal structure.

"Alluring Oozemaiden:" audio recordings of a complex, fluting cry in the great trenches are widely known, but only one exploration team has returned alive from an alleged encounter with its source, describing an elongated, luminescent pink nudibranch with a crudely humanoid outline and a sweet fragrance, protruding from the center of a pool of unidentified purple liquid. Three of the team decided to keep their distance upon realizing the fragrance was making them feel strange, "like a few shots of alcohol," but were unable to convince the remaining four to turn back with them. These four allegedly waded into the purple fluid until fully submerged, after which the gastropod disappeared beneath the surface. Neither the explorers nor the mollusc reappeared before the surviving witnesses fled.

"Hangman's Head:" the first report of this animal describes a globular, pale blue-grey slug dangling from the boughs of a tree by a long, winding "tail," its anterior end pointed downward with a cluster of short, thin oral tentacles and four prominent eyestalks in constant motion. The body of this slug was reported to bear a perfect imitation of a human face, causing the witness to give it a wide berth. A second, similar report claimed that this face had a mouth and eyes indistinguishable from a genuine human head, which "looked" directly at the approaching team with a "panicked expression." The team avoided any further contact, but investigated the site the following morning. The unidentified slug was not found, but a human cadaver was found buried in leaf litter at the base of the same tree. The body's head was not found.

"Old Slugface:" the popular campfire legend has gained increasing scientific credibility in recent years with several brief video recordings of a dark, humanoid figure wading through the swamps. Typically claimed to be a large, fully bipedal gastropod with a pair of powerful upper "arms," the most recent eyewitness actually claims the figure to be comprised of many smaller sized Gastropoda of assorted species. As the witness pursued this figure, it allegedly "threw" slugs and snails at them until it began to dwindle in size, eventually leaving only a small pile of unremarkable molluscs.

"Shadowslick:" recent years have seen a steady exponential increase in reports of a "living shadow" or a "crawling hole;" a large, elongate organism between three and six meters in length with a surface that reflects absolutely no light. Its gastropodal nature is deduced from the presence of a slime trail and two whiplike anterior tentacles. This slug can evidently move with blinding speed, and its tentacles are said to "slice" through solid matter with impossible ease. No fatalities or disappearances have been directly associated with this entity, but it has been implicated in the obstruction of multiple efforts to map the deeper trenches. In the most recent and extreme case, a large expedition was forced to turn back when a young explorer fell behind and immediately lost both legs, cleanly severed just below the knees. The victim's subsequent claims have been attributed to blood loss, shock and delirium, but he remains adamant that the Shadowslick spoke to him, in plain Pacificese, well before inflicting the injuries. This is the first report of any slug exhibiting coherent speech, which was described as a deep, metallic voice with a "sorrowful" quality. 

The slug is quoted as saying "If you knew what's down there, you'd thank me."