Behold – The Giant Pink Slugs of Mount Kaputar

Posted by: Karl Shuker on December 5th, 2013

Sometimes, the most surprising discoveries can be right before our eyes, without even being recognised. Take the remarkable case of the giant pink slugs of remote Mount Kaputar in New South Wales, Australia.
 
Giant pink slug
(© NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service)
 
Measuring a very sizeable 8 in long, and boasting an extremely bright, fluorescent pink body colouration that looks more akin to a particularly lurid Photoshop creation than anything designed by Mother Nature, these exceptionally eyecatching, moss-munching molluscs are found nowhere else on Earth. They have been known to science for a very long time, but only now have they been exposed as a completely new, hitherto-unrecognised species in their own right – and which actually constitutes the largest native species of land slug in the whole of Australia!
 
Further details regarding this remarkable discovery can be found here on my ShukerNature blog.

Karl Shuker About Karl Shuker
My name is Dr Karl P.N. Shuker. I am a zoologist (BSc & PhD), media consultant, and the author of 25 books and hundreds of articles, specialising in cryptozoology and animal mythology. I have a BSc (Honours) degree in pure zoology from the University of Leeds (U.K.), and a PhD in zoology and comparative physiology from the University of Birmingham (U.K.). I have acted jointly as consultant and major contributor to three multi-author volumes on cryptozoology and other mysterious phenomena. I am the Life Sciences Consultant to The Guinness Book of Records/Guinness World Records (Guinness: London, 1997-present day), and was consultant to Monsters (Lorenz Books: London, 2001), as well as a contributor to Mysteries of the Deep (Llewellyn: St Paul, 1998), Guinness Amazing Future (Guinness: London, 1999), The Earth (Channel 4 Books: London, 2000), and Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained (Chambers: London, 2007). I appear regularly on television & radio, was a consultant for the Discovery TV series Into the Unknown, and a question setter for the BBC's quiz show Mastermind. I am a Scientific Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, a Member of the Society of Authors, and the Cryptozoology Consultant for the Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ). I have written articles for numerous publications, including Fortean Times, The X Factor, Paranormal Magazine, FATE, Strange Magazine, Prediction, Beyond, Uri Geller's Encounters, Phenomena, Alien Encounters, Wild About Animals, All About Cats, All About Dogs, Cat World, etc. In 2005, I was honoured by the naming of a new species of loriciferan invertebrate after me - Pliciloricus shukeri.


11 Responses to “Behold – The Giant Pink Slugs of Mount Kaputar”

  1. Goodfoot responds:

    That’s the most horrifying thing ever.

  2. David-Australia responds:

    Karl – me again . . . I’ve been there several times and didn’t know at the time that they even existed.

  3. DWA responds:

    You can have something like that crawling around, suddenly Bigfoot ain’t so farfetched, eh?

  4. cryptokellie responds:

    I would imagine that the pink coloration is used for camouflage on the forest floor and saying to birds and other predators…I don’t taste very good, which may or may not be the actual case.

  5. cryptokellie responds:

    Unfortunately, there is a world of difference between a well-known group of animals and speculative group as Bigfoot.

  6. DWA responds:

    cryptokellie: actually, when viewed without the obscuring veil of superstition, that’s not really true.

    Denial is superstition, just in reverse. It’s believing something everything tells one not to, because it makes one comfortable. That’s science on sasquatch.

    Let’s look at this utterly objectively. Screen out two species: this slug and sasquatch. Introduce all the other information about earth wildlife, past and present, to an extraterrestrial zoologist. Now show slug and sasquatch as hypotheticals and ask the zoologist: if you picked one, which would it be?

    Answers:

    Pink animals don’t happen. No reason an animal would adopt that color. There are so many other patterns and colors that have been used and repeated, why that one, for that animal, there? Not gonna happen.

    Sasquatch? Oh, so of all those guys, one ISN’T a fossil? Cool. That’s the real one, right?

  7. cryptokellie responds:

    DWA@
    My point is…
    You can’t show the Sasquatch as a species of anything at this point in time as there is no proof positive available at this point in time.
    Now, pink animals don’t happen? That assumption is plain ignorance of the uninformed.
    Here are just a few…
    Neon Pink Planthopper…Mexico
    Hot Pink Planthopper…Suriman
    Flamingos…of course
    Scarlet/pink Ibis…South America
    Galah Pink and Grey Cockatoo…Australia
    Pink and Orange Spider…Madagascar
    Pink Flatid Leaf Bug…Madagascar
    Raspberry Dragonfly…Madagascar
    Pink Anthias fish…Great Barrier Reef
    Elephant Hawk Moth…Bitish Isles – Europe & Asia
    Dragon Milipede…Mekong Delta
    Leucistic Axolotl…Central Mexico
    Amazon River Dolphin
    Pink Grasshopper…Romania
    Ohm…European Cave salamander
    Texas Blind Salamander…Texa/Oklahoma
    Pink Handfish…Australia
    Pink Tree Tarantula…Amazon Basin
    Blood Starfish…Pacific Coastal N.A.
    Pink Dorid Nudibranch…Coastal Bali Reefs
    All real animals that are naturally pink colored, not albino pinkish specimens.
    As yet, the Sasquatch is not a real, scientifically documented animal, pink or otherwise.
    There are many more actual occurring pink animals but, no need to continue…

  8. DWA responds:

    …and we have as much evidence for sasquatch as we have for all of those…including a movie of one. Scientists just don’t accept it as proof…which, for those of us well-acquainted with the sasquatch evidence, doesn’t really mean anything.

    “Pink Tree Tarantula…Amazon Basin” got no hits on Google. And the alien zoologist would say about the others: nothing is THIS pink.

    Just sayin’. 😉

  9. cryptokellie responds:

    These are not only all real animals but, science has actual specimens – read…bodies – to study. Bigfoot is not in this category or company. Someday I hope but, not yet.

    Type in Google; Antilles Pinktoe Tarantula and you’ll get there. I didn’t even start on the shelled mollusks…Go take a look at the Cornish Pink Spider Crab, rediscovered after 100 years. But DWA, you’re smarter than this and I think you’re just yanking an old man’s chain.

    BTW, I just finished babysitting my 5 mos old Granddaughter…she’s pink too…lol.

  10. DWA responds:

    Well, if I could never yank a chain around here, what fun would it be.

    The recent Hominin Follies, messing up scientists’ neat clean picture of the last, oh, half-million years of human evolution, combine with scientists’ attitude to the sasquatch evidence to make even more firm my understanding that evidence is evidence. Proof? That’s just what scientists say it is…and may not even be more valuable for that.

  11. cryptokellie responds:

    I agree with that 100%. The overwhelming majority of scientists are much like politicians, they spout the talking points of conventional scientific wisdom. Throw in the politically correct, angling for grants via tax-payers money green crowd and any real understanding of what this planet is all about is gone with the wind. I forgot more about the Earth’s past than Al Gore knows which in reality, is probably very little.

Sorry. Comments have been closed.

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