Tiny Tuesday : : Slimy

Well, Kanga Zu, this was quite a challenge. By definition, anything slimy is NOT photogenic...or tiny! Or so I thought. I was spotted all over town today with my camera in some pretty improbable places, but nothing really fit the bill. I found a few puddles but they were neither tiny nor slimy. 

The potholes at the bottom of our driveway, which were definitely slimy, were filled yesterday by the county road crew. I was talking to a neighbor who has lived here since this road was a road and she said the county hasn't repaved it in 30 years. What they did yesterday was drive by and shovel asphalt into the considerable hole without ever getting down from the truck, leaving us to tamp it down by driving over it with our cars. Asphalt isn't slimy either;  it is black and sticky and doesn't look good on my car.

I got an email from the Audubon Canyon Ranch saying that the banana slugs are back at the Bouverie Preserve.* This excellent organization has  several natural preserves which are used for the environmental education of fourth and fifth graders.  Banana slugs are certainly slimy, but they aren't tiny, and access  is still exclusively limited to staff and the caterpillars while they clean up from the Nun's fire, the same fire which threatened our neighborhood in October.

I was spotted in the produce department at the market photographing fruit and veggies...colorful, sometimes wet, or weird, or both, but not slimy. The oft photographed euphorbia in the garden was promising, but the white liquid that pours out of it is sticky and not water soluble...so kind of the opposite of slimy.

When I was in Japan we often had conversations about a Japanese 'delicacy' called nattõ . Made of fermented soy beans, it probably has the highest slime factor known to man, but I've never seen it outside of Japan, which is just as well because it is truly gross. Or, to quote Wikipedia, "Nattõ may be an acquired taste because of its powerful smell, strong flavor and slimy texture".

I was about to give up when I walked past our own oft photographed 'water feature'. Peering into it's shallow depths I spotted several tiny snails and a wealth of algae...and although the resulting photographs weren't recognizable as either slimy or tiny, take my word for it...they are, even though the picture reminds me of some sort of desert location. I couldn't get close enough to anything without putting my camera in the water, so you'll have to take my word for the fact that the black thing that looks like a rock is a tiny snail, and the green stuff that looks like trees next to a cliff are tiny clumps of very slimy algae.... 

Here's is a link to one as a consolation prize....can you believe those teeth?