Triboniophorus graeffei

Given that this is Australia and that thing has bright striking colors...how poisonous is it?

I think it's like Texas: everything there either sticks, stings, or stinks.

I was amazed at the spinifex grass near Ayers Rock: like needle-sharp stiff plastic!

Night of the living booger!

Glen Davidson

Which way is up in that picture?

(i.e., is it clinging to ceiling or wall, or is in on the "floor"?)

"how poisonous is it?"

It's not the poison that I would worry about. Since it is in Australia it might be venomous! (see: Platypus) It might even throw spears at you!!

Or spurs?

Absolutely smashing photo, well done.

Every slug I've ever seen (all of them in the UK, of course) has been some variant of black, brown, or orange. Or leapord spotted, now I think about it. Presumably this has evolved as a form of camouflage, so how does this white critter avoid getting picked off by whatever it is that eats this sort of thing in Australia?

Presumably it just slugs whatever tries to eat it?

Apparently they can eat bathroom mould. I want one. Lizards and other mollusc eaters them, but I don't have one of those. The flat shape makes them difficult to pick up, or so the Australian Museum website says.

This critter's coloration makes it well-suited for habitats such as Santa's workshop. Perhaps the Intelligent Designer confused North and South?

On the subject of invertebrates, can I apologise now for going back in time and stepping on that butterfly? It seems to have had an unexpected and unwelcome effect on US politics.

Is that what caused it???

Curse you, DanHolme!

The slug was under the safety rail of a lookout. You can see a drop of water on its back hanging downwards.

This guy apparently did what I was only joking about:

As a naturalist, Robinson is keen to experiment with biological controls of all sorts. Since he settled in Narraweena, he has offered houseroom to a whole menagerie of creatures in return for their doing a few chores. His ultimate aim is to build up a trouble-free staff of animals that can be left alone to get on with the job. Already, he has turned up previously hidden talents among some of the local fauna.

The slugs were his first employees. "Some slugs love mould. They thrive on it," says Robinson. "I noticed a few came into the house and headed for the bathroom. A friend of mine had seen slugs eating mould in his house so I thought I'd test it out." Worried that the molluscs would never make it across the vast expanse of carpet that lay between them and the bathroom, he gathered them up and carried them to their new home. "Lo and behold, it worked. They kept the mould down. They didn't get rid of it completely but we only needed to do a little work. They are particularly good at cleaning grout, silicone sealer and other hard-to-reach places," he says.

From: http://www.anapsid.org/slugcleaner.html

(Sorry about the butterfly, by the way. I'd only gone back to stop Biff from showing his future self the Sports Almanac. Doesn't look like that worked either.)

BTW, DanHolme's butterfly reference is to a short story by Ray Bradbury, "A Sound of Thunder".

A sound of thunder, 1952. I probably read that story in an anthology around 1955, but I had forgotten it was Bradbury. Is it the origin of the phrase "butterfly effect"?

While the concept (chaos theory) was certainly not new, the phrase itself seems to have come from a 1972 presentation by Edward Lorenz, Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?, in which he described how he had accidentally discovered that minute differences in the initial settings of a weather simulation program could lead to drastically different final outcomes.

The Bradbury story can be considered a particularly appropriate proto-example of the Butterfly Effect, however.