His regular prey is the Snail.
This detail has long been known to entomologists.

What is not so well known, what is not known at all yet, to judge by what I have read, is the curious method of attack, of which I have seen no other instance anywhere.
Before he begins to feast, the Glow-worm administers an anaesthetic: he chloroforms his victim, rivalling in the process the wonders of our modern surgery, which renders the patient insensible before operating on him.

The usual game is a small Snail hardly the size of a cherry, such as, for instance, Helix variabilis, Drap., who, in the hot weather, collects in clusters on the stiff stubble and other long, dry stalks by the road-side and there remains motionless, in profound meditation, throughout the scorching summer days.

It is in some such resting-place as this that I have often been privileged to light upon the Lampyris banqueting on the prey which he had just paralysed on its shaky support by his surgical artifices.
But he is familiar with other preserves.

He frequents the edges of the irrigating ditches, with their cool soil, their varied vegetation, a favourite haunt of the Mollusc.