Question

Kimberly Carrot loves to practice her passion – gardening! She often talks to the slugs that enjoy munching on her vegetables. In fact, she sometimes goes inside and returns with a saltshaker and sprinkles the slugs with salt. Kimberly’s neighbors think that is rather strange. Why does Kimberly Carrot sprinkle the slugs with salt? Describe, in detail, what happens to the slug in terms of osmosis.

Answer 1

Salt and pepper go together, but salt and slugs don’t pair so well. If you’ve ever battled the slimy gastropods in your garden (or just had a sadistic bent as a kid), you know that a few pinches of salt can kill them. But why? What is it about salt that causes the creepy crawlies to wither?

The answer, in a word, is osmosis: the process that occurs when a solution meets a permeable membrane. A solution is a homogenous mixture of two (or more) substances where one substance, the solute, is dissolved in the other, the solvent. When you have a solution on both sides of a permeable membrane, the solvent tends to pass through the membrane to whichever side has more solute so that concentration on both sides is evened out. That’s osmosis.