Upwardly mobile snails

One of the stranger sights of autumn is the way in which snails seem to have a compulsion to climb to the top of hogweed Heracleum sphondylium stems during wet weather. These are just a few of over 50 that I counted on a single hogweed plant recently.

They seem to have a passion for the thin layer of soft rotting tissues on the outside of the dying plant's stem.