Slugs are hampering efforts to restore wild flower meadows Since the 1930s around 97 per cent of wild flower meadows have been lost due to the spread of intensive farming and urban development, leading to many rare species to decline. Bees and butterflies have suffered due to the loss of vital habitat. The Government has also promised to help farmers plant more wildflowers in a bid to stop the decline of bees and other pollinators while Royal Horticultural Society has also been campaigning for its members to plant more wild flowers. However, the new research, which is published in the journal Annals of Botany, found the field slug, Deroceras reticulatum, is hindering these attempts. The researchers say the slug activity may need to be managed to help these projects to be successful. Dr Sarah Barlow, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew who carried out the research while at Newcastle University, said: "What these initial studies have shown is that Deroceras reticulatum may actually be very damaging in this situation due to it finding some key species particularly tasty. One of these, red clover, is particularly important due to the symbiotic bacteria which live in its roots and help to fix Nitrogen into the soil, benefiting not just the clover but all the meadow seedlings. The researchers looked at 23 different meadow species and examined the level of damage caused by slugs. The slugs favourite foods were red clover, yarrow, Yorkshire fog, rough-stalked meadow grass and creeping red rescue. They tended to avoid wildflowers such as wood cranesbill, rough hawkbit and greater burnet. Dr Gordon Port, a senior lecturer and an expert in pest management at Newcastle University, added: "We have to cope with native slugs in our gardens and crops, but this research shows they can be equally damaging in natural systems."