Slug Festival

By: © Nelson Taylor 2008

Festival Location: Eatonville, WA, USA

Festival State: Washington Festivals

Festival Type: Bizarre Festivals

Here's some slug trivia for you. Slugs have been around since the dinosaurs. The wet Olympic coast is home to 23 species of slugs. They have two tentacles, one for seeing and the other for feeling. Because their tentacles movie independently, they can see in two directions at once. Slugs have 27,000 teeth and eat their weight everyday. It would take more than 9 hours for a slug to finish a 100-yard dash.

That's why the organizers of the annual Slug Festival held every July no longer hold slug races. "It just wasn't much fun," Susan Hulbert of the Northwest Trek Wildlife Park says. So instead of racing slugs, they gather up several different species from the forest and put them on display. The slug native to this area of Washington is the banana slug, which is green and yellow and can be the length of a banana too. In addition to educational talks about these mini mollusks, there's lots of slimy games for the kids.