Tarah wrote:I put down slug pellets yesterday. Keep the blighters off my plants. I rather like snails though.
Have you ever seen snails or slugs performing the act of love? It is weird and quite sexy. They circle each other at first. Slowly. Well you knew that bit. Then they couple, for ages. They dont jiggle, but they seem to enjoy it. Well I suppose it's hard to tell, but they're certainly at it a long time.
Hey I found this:
Most land snails and slugs possess both male and female parts. In some types or species, an individual may behave as either male or as a female they tend to do this for a while. When snails mate, two individuals pull up next to one another, arrange themselves so that the male part of one is opposite the female part of the other, and then each ejects male sperm into the female opening of the other. In a few snail and slug species, self-fertilization occurs, an hermaphroditic individual mates with itself and produces offspring which are clones of itself.
and
A commonly seen practice among many slugs is apophallation, when one or both of the slugs chew off the other's penis. The penis of these species is curled like a cork-screw and often becomes entangled in their mate's genitalia in the process of exchanging sperm. Apophallation allows the slugs to separate themselves. Once the penis has been removed, the slug remains female for the rest of its life.
