Life on the Watershed: The Unlikely Community Pillar

Rains and lingering  moisture bring out one of the unsung champions of the forest. 

The lowly banana slug may be short on appeal to us, but it is pivotal to forest nutrition and regeneration. As it propels its slow  way along the ground with one powerful little foot, it eats up fallen leaves and twigs, animal droppings, and other dead matter, which it decomposes and recycles into a dark nutrient-rich soil humus. The humus is excreted onto the forest floor, where it mixes in with the existing soils and fuels the roots of new and existing trees and other plant life.      

Unlike the reviled garden slug that can level your herbs and other greenery, this organism prefers dead stuff. 

The lowly banana slug is a woodland community pillar.