look for snails this month

SLIME (incredibly appropriately named) is a community science project documenting the vast variety of land snails and slugs that inhabit Southern California. Every year, NHMLA hosts SnailBlitz: two straight months of encouraging people in the region to photograph every gastropod friend that glides (slithers? slimes?) across their paths. Dead snails/slugs count, too. And SnailBlitz 2024 is happening RIGHT NOW.

Until March 31st, you can help document snails in a few different ways:

• Upload photos to the (totally free-to-use) iNaturalist platform. You don’t have to know what kind of snail or slug you’re looking at — you can select “common land snails and slugs” and folks on the platform can help ID from there.
• E-mail photos to slime@nhm.org — just be sure to include the date and location (address or intersection) of where each picture was taken.
• Share snail and slug photos to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook with #SnailBlitz2024, and NHM staff and volunteers will contact you to get your photo added to the project. 

a few non-native snails & slugs you might see

if you keep any of these as pets … please don’t release them outside.

Milk snails are beautiful but, like many other introduced species, can pose a huge threat to California’s native snails. They’re also exceptionally good at eating plants.

The tip of decollate snails’ shells break off as they get older, leaving more mature snails with only a few shell whirls at a time. Weird? (Cool.)

My mom had one of these sneak into her garage a little while ago. It lived in a clump of dried moss and would emerge to slime around only under the cover of darkness.

Also known as the white garden snail, these small friends are known as massive agricultural pests. Cute but deadly.

you’ll probably also see …

• Garden snails. They’re everywhere. And currently the most-observed species by community scientists in the SLIME project.
• Green garden snails. (Aka, Houdini.)
• Draparnaud’s glass snail. Which, coincidentally, can also be found in gardens.

You can stay up-to-date with all things SnailBlitz here. Happy snail-searching!

in other news …

• I helped moderate this live corpse flower Q&A — an exceedingly special and stinky event!
• TOMORROW, I’m co-hosting a free zine workshop for youth at the Community Environmental Council in Santa Barbara — whether you know a youth or are one yourself, learn more here and tell a friend!
• Stay tuned for some interviews with artists in the weeks to come. And if you’re a CA-based artist that’d be interested in a feature in this newsletter, let me know (seastarya@gmail.com)!