Snails do it slowly

Mummy, what are those snails doing?
Well,
you might begin, when Daddy snail loves Mummy snail very much...
but you'd already be lying because which is Mummy and which is Daddy? Snails are hermaphrodites so they are both at once.

The garden snail Helix aspersa pursues a very complex sex life right there in our back gardens. The act of love lasts several hours and begins with the couple touching tentacles, kissing and canoodling. Only when are both sufficiently aroused, and the genital areas (below the right eye!) are swollen, can mating proceed. But before that - and this is the strangest part - first one and then the other snail fires a love dart into the body of its partner. This dart, made of calcium or chitin, is formed within a special sac and may be several millimetres long. The propulsive force is sufficient to embed it in the body of the recipient snail or even for it to pass right through. Because snails have poor eyesight the darts sometimes miss altogether. (It's thought that the Greeks got the idea of Cupid's arrow from observing the courtship of the snail.)

The purpose of the love dart was once thought to have a stimulating function but research has shown that the dart is coated with a hormone which contracts one part of the female half of the reproductive system of the snail that has been struck with the dart, and prevents the sperm from being digested as often happens. It's a mechanism for maximising the chance of successful fertilization. This exchange of darts takes place before every mating. Mutual copulation then ensues - which is what you can see here. During mating each snail everts its penis and ejects the fertilizing sperm into the vagina of the partner. The two snails then separate, and each stores the sperm of the other until its own eggs have ripened.

Gerald Durrell described his first encounter with a romantic pair of snails in My Family and Other Animals:

As I watched them they glided up to each other until their horns touched. Then they paused and gazed long and earnestly into each other's eyes. One of them then shifted his position slightly so that he could glide alongside the other one. When he was alongside, something happened that made me doubt the evidence of my own eyes. From his side, and almost simultaneously from the side of the other snail, there shot what appeared to be two minute, fragile white darts, each attached to a slender white cord. The dart from snail one pierced the side of snail two and disappeared, and the dart from snail two performed a similar function on snail one. So, there they were, side by side attached to each other by the two little white cords. And there they sat like two curious sailing ships roped together. This was amazing enough, but stranger things were to follow. The cords gradually appeared to get shorter and shorter and drew the two snails together. Peering at them so closely that my nose was almost touching them, I came to the incredulous conclusion that each snail, by some incredible mechanism in its body, was winching its rope in, thus hauling the other until presently their bodies were pressed tightly together. I knew they must be mating, but their bodies had become so amalgamated that I could not see the precise nature of the act. They stayed rapturously side by side for some fifteen minutes and then, without so much as a nod or a thank you, they glided away in opposite directions, neither one displaying any signs of darts or ropes, or indeed any sign of enthusiasm at having culminated their love affair successfully.

When Gerald's elder brother Larry (Lawrence Durrell) heard about this he exclaimed 'Good God, I think it's unfair. All those damned slimy things wandering about seducing each other like mad all over the bushes, and having the pleasures of both sensations. Why couldn't such a gift be given to the human race? That's what I want to know.'

My alternative title for this blip was Stuck On You although Elvis didn't need no love darts!

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