Well I did scrape them into a glass jar, but it was full of salty water, so I don't think they'll be hatching. I found a whole lot more too, so they all went in. I really don't want that many slugs around.
Charlie I think you must have been typing your message at the same time as I was doing mine. I was worried that I had done something awful when I read what you had written, but having thought about it overnight, I'm still pretty confident that they were slug eggs. The coating was extremely sticky, even on the shiny ones that had dried out when the sun got through a gap in the logs. The second (huge) patch that I found when I was clearing up the first lot, was in a much more protected place out of the sun, and was still very jelly like. I'm hoping that they cannot have been the same type of eggs as you had on your fence, which seems much too exposed.
If they are in a damp area. they are NOT going to be ladybird eggs or anything else for that matter, most likely some form of mollusc, typically slug or snail, if they look black, you've caught them just in time, they are hours away from hatching.. gleefully sweep them away and cackle as another generation fail to wolf your Hostas!!! Sorry was that too dramatic?
We found these at a local nature reserve last week. For some reason the website isn't uploading my picture, but there was a discarded frog skin, lots of intestines and these. We assumed they were spawn from inside the frog which had clearly been predated. The pond side was littered with remnants of frog so we assumed they'd been predated and whatever ate the frog didn't care for spawn!
If you blow the image up, you can see the gelatinous coating on the ones which were covered by leaves/debris, which Valerie mentioned. That's why i guessed at slug eggs.
A trowel in the hand is worth a thousand lost under a bush.
One thing it isn't is frog spawn... not regurgitated frog spawn, not spawn squeezed out of an animal... I've seen that a hundred times and it only has a very superficial resemblance to what is pictured. This mythical explanation is all over the internet to explain away bug eggs even in mid-summer.
I can though see what BobTheGardener is saying about slug eggs, a black slug species about to hatch is a possibility, either that or beetle eggs of some sort which is still my feeling as to what they were.
Regurgitated frog spawn was found to be the cause of lumps of white jelly in the countryside. I thought it was Nostoc, but studies found otherwise. No idea about the eggs, but slime moulds aka Myxomycetes are soft and squishy when immature then powdery. Hyphomycetes a kind of fungi can also look like eggs.
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Well I did scrape them into a glass jar, but it was full of salty water, so I don't think they'll be hatching. I found a whole lot more too, so they all went in. I really don't want that many slugs around.
Charlie I think you must have been typing your message at the same time as I was doing mine. I was worried that I had done something awful when I read what you had written, but having thought about it overnight, I'm still pretty confident that they were slug eggs. The coating was extremely sticky, even on the shiny ones that had dried out when the sun got through a gap in the logs. The second (huge) patch that I found when I was clearing up the first lot, was in a much more protected place out of the sun, and was still very jelly like. I'm hoping that they cannot have been the same type of eggs as you had on your fence, which seems much too exposed.
If they are in a damp area. they are NOT going to be ladybird eggs or anything else for that matter, most likely some form of mollusc, typically slug or snail, if they look black, you've caught them just in time, they are hours away from hatching.. gleefully sweep them away and cackle as another generation fail to wolf your Hostas!!! Sorry was that too dramatic?
Probably a bit dramatic as the black species of slugs are usually on the whole beneficial in the garden and won't eat a hosta.
They don't look like slug or snail eggs to me. Like I said at the start, some sort of bug (beetle) but I couldn't tell which from the pictures.
We found these at a local nature reserve last week. For some reason the website isn't uploading my picture, but there was a discarded frog skin, lots of intestines and these. We assumed they were spawn from inside the frog which had clearly been predated. The pond side was littered with remnants of frog so we assumed they'd been predated and whatever ate the frog didn't care for spawn!
If you blow the image up, you can see the gelatinous coating on the ones which were covered by leaves/debris, which Valerie mentioned. That's why i guessed at slug eggs.
One thing it isn't is frog spawn... not regurgitated frog spawn, not spawn squeezed out of an animal... I've seen that a hundred times and it only has a very superficial resemblance to what is pictured. This mythical explanation is all over the internet to explain away bug eggs even in mid-summer.
I can though see what BobTheGardener is saying about slug eggs, a black slug species about to hatch is a possibility, either that or beetle eggs of some sort which is still my feeling as to what they were.
The 'slime' had all the stickiness of Araldite adhesive that had not quite gone off yet.
Regurgitated frog spawn was found to be the cause of lumps of white jelly in the countryside. I thought it was Nostoc, but studies found otherwise. No idea about the eggs, but slime moulds aka Myxomycetes are soft and squishy when immature then powdery. Hyphomycetes a kind of fungi can also look like eggs.