Love darts are shaped in many distinctive ways which vary considerably between species. This is because mucus on the dart contains an allomone (pheromone-like) compound that promotes sperm preservation mechanisms in the female. Nevertheless, recent research shows that use of the dart can strongly favor the reproductive outcome for the snail that is able to lodge a dart in its partner. The exchange of sperm between both of the two land snails is a completely separate part of the mating progression. The love dart is not a penial stylet (in other words, this is not an accessory organ for sperm transfer). The dart does not fly through the air to reach its target, but is "fired" as a contact shot. There is no organ to receive the dart this action is more analogous to stabbing, or to being shot with an arrow or flechette. Prior to copulation, each of the two snails (or slugs) attempts to "shoot" one (or more) darts into the other snail (or slug). The process of using love darts in snails is a form of sexual selection. Darts are quite large compared to the size of the animal: in the case of the semi-slug genus Parmarion, the length of a dart can be up to one fifth that of the semi-slug's foot. These darts are made in sexually mature animals only, and are used as part of the sequence of events during courtship, before actual mating takes place.
Love darts are both formed and stored internally in a dart sac.
#Snail penis archive
And welcome to the club of weird animal sex that’ll inevitably get this column canceled.īrowse the full Absurd Creature of the Week archive here.A love dart from Cornu aspersum (garden snail) on a ruler for comparison, showing its length of 7 mm.Ī love dart (also known as a gypsobelum, shooting darts, or just as darts) is a sharp, calcareous or chitinous dart which some hermaphroditic land snails and slugs create.
Nothing to be ashamed of, you little maverick. So the leopard slug is a double rebel, casting aside a shell while adopting one of nature’s most bizarre mating rituals. Other species have lost the shells altogether.) (Slugs, though, do indeed have remnants of their erstwhile shells: The leopard slug’s is an internal structure about the size and shape of your fingernail-unless you've got Shaq hands, I guess. Plus, making that shell requires calcium carbonate, which may be in short supply in a given environment.
Slugs may not have a shell they can retreat into to avoid drying out, but they have a whole world of crevices to explore.Īlso, keep in mind that for a snail, building a shell is a tremendous energy suck-energy its slug cousins can divert elsewhere.
#Snail penis crack
With those big unwieldy shells, snails can’t squeeze into small spaces-say, a crack in a log or some such-where it’s nice and moist. In fairness, though, the big disadvantage to hermaphroditism is that it's more energetically costly to produce both eggs and sperm, as opposed to one or the other. Not only does it all but guarantee that any two sexually mature slugs can come together to make babies, it also means that when they do mate, both parties can end up fertilized. But why, when other slugs do the horizontal tango perfectly fine on the ground? Well, a lot of it has to do with the leopard slug’s gigantic penis, of course.įirst things first: Slugs are hermaphrodites, and that’s a neat evolutionary move. So may I present to you the acrobatic, upside-down sex of the leopard slug, done hanging from a branch on a line of slime. Or the little marsupial that has so much sex it bleeds internally and goes blind and dies. Like that of the parasite that devours a fish's tongue and mates in its mouth. If you read this column with even the slightest regularity, you know that the animal kingdom has no shortage of weird sex.
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