They are slow and squishy. They have soft bodies and no shells. They have basically no way to defend themselves, from what I know.
I’d assume that there are some poisonous species, but other than that: how have these things not died out yet??
Just to be a little more detailed than other answers:
Like they said, they get eaten a lot, but they also reproduce a lot more. Think about something like dust in a room. Dust has no chance against your cleaning, when you wipe off a surface, the dust is gone. Same if something decides to eat the slug, the slug is eaten.
But when you clean a room, do you always clean absolutely everywhere? Did you clean the dust from the top of the lamps? The dust from below the carpet? While you were off cleaning one side of the room, didn’t some new dust already settle on the surfaces you just cleaned? And so on.
So yes, you’re absolutely correct in everything you say. But defending yourself is not necessary when there’s just so much of your species that they can’t all get eaten at the same time.
remon@ani.social 1 day ago
They do get eaten. It’s just that there are more slugs total than slugs that get eaten. This is also true for any other animal that isn’t an apex predator.