Last week was miserable – two consecutive days of heavy rain warnings, grey, miserable, and only brief snippets of sunshine all week. Despite this, and much to my amazement, when I donned full waterproofs, grabbed my small waterproof camera, and went out for a walk last Wednesday, I found two new-to-me species.

The first was this Ghost slug (Selenochlamys ysbryda), a species first formally recognised and named here in Wales in 2008: you may not recognise the Welsh but the epithet of its scientific name, ysbryda, is from the word ysbryd meaning ghost. The scientists think this slug has been introduced, presumably accidentally, as it has also been found in the Crimean mountains of Ukraine.

I was first alerted to the presence of Ghost slugs in a local park by the person who runs the park’s Twitter account. That was in April 2023, and then Gareth contacted me again on Tuesday to say he’d found another. I couldn’t get there till the following day and was surprised to see the slug where it had been the previous day, though the reason soon became obvious – it was dead. So, it was a Ghost slug in more ways than one!