Slugs as Lab Rats

I once watched an Irish mollusk researcher, in a fit of slug chauvinism, try to convince an audience of biologists that slugs are superior lab rats. "Behaviorally speaking, a slug is basically a rat," he told them. "Cover a rat in slime, amputate its legs, pull its genitalia up behind its right ear, and film it in slow motion, and you've got a slug!"

Menno Schilthuizen, Nature's Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us Abut Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), p. 168 (quoting Anthony Cook at the World Congress of Malacology in Siena, Italy, in 1992)