Prompted by a post in an unrelated thread in Cafe Society: does salt water have the same effect on snails and slugs as pure salt does?
It would depend on the concentration, but it shouldn’t have as much effect, at least. The reason salt shrivels slugs is that the outside environment has a higher concentration of salt than the inside, so water flows through the slug’s membranes to try to equalize the concentrations, which means water that should be inside the slug ends up outside. But if the salt water had the same concentration as internal slug fluids, then there wouldn’t be a tendency for water to flow either way, and the slug would be fine.
Thanks, Chronos.