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This Valentine ’s Day , prankish Cupid will be fluttering about with bowknot in hand , seeking out mortal hearts to pierce with his love - ting arrow . But the wing god is n’t the only one known for this form of conduct — oddly , land snails are also get laid to shoot " beloved dart . "
Land snailsbelong to the gastropod social class , which includes thousand of escargot and stagnate species that sport a all-inclusive range of reproductive behaviour .
ACornu aspersumsnail that was hit in the head by a love-dart (arrow) so hard that the dart came out the other side of its head, next to the right eystalk.
couple for these metal money typically occurs in the wetter months , tell Joris Koene , a biologist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands whose research focuses on love flit .
All land escargot are epicene person , meaning that the animals have both male and distaff reproductive organs . The snail expend their twenty-four hours looking for food and seeking out potential mates using chemical substance ( perfume ) cue stick . [ exposure : Bizarre sexual urge Lives of Hermaphrodite Sea Slugs ]
" They have eyes at the tips of their tentacles , but they do n’t really see that well , and their hearing is also pretty much lacking , " Koene told Live Science . " So one way of finding partners is by site ooze trail that they leave and hopefully fall out in the ripe direction . "
ACornu aspersumsnail that was hit in the head by a love-dart (arrow) so hard that the dart came out the other side of its head, next to the right eystalk.
Courtship and darts
When two adult earth escargot meet up , they engage in acourtship dance , in which they circulate around each other and touch each other with their tentacle . " When you look at them from the top , they look like like yin and yang , " Koene enounce .
During this ritual , the snails look for traits that they find likeable , such as a large torso size , which is significative of safe fitness and being able to invest more energy into egg production .
This scanning electron micrograph shows the love dart of the snailEverettia corrugate corrugate.
For many species , the next step in the mating process is to shoot their love flit into each other .
At least nine families of land snails bring forth sexual love darts , though the accurate number really bet on your definition of the structure , Koene said . Some species have dart structures made of hard calcium carbonate ( the same material that makes up their shells ) , while others have softer structures made of a fibrous pith called chitin . " I tend to not call those [ chitin structures ] beloved darts , " he said .
Though it ’s said the snails " germinate " their dearest dart , the calcium carbonate social organisation do n’t actually fly through the air travel . Rather , the love darts are take shape within a powerful sack in the body that forcefully evert when a escargot come into contact with its mate , piercing its body and hopefully reaching the hemolymph ( bloodlike fluid in invertebrates ) .
These love darts come in all shapes and size of it — and number .
Many specie germinate a single dart , while others may shoot multiple darts . Some snails , such as the Japanese speciesEuhadra subnimbosa , will repeatedly stab their Paraguay tea with the same dart over and over again for about an hour .
In a 2006 study in the journalThe American Naturalist , Joene and his fellow Satoshi Chiba found thatE. subnimbosastabs its better half , on fair , a staggering 3,311 times .
Improving the odds
When the muscular sack Evert , two glands sequester to it squirt a kind of mucus onto the dart , which participate the female - acting escargot ’s hemolymph . " This mucus modulate contraction in the femalereproductive organization , " Koene said .
The mucus closes off the entrance to a certain organ in the centripetal escargot ’s body that would otherwise " digest " a mate ’s sperm , allowing more of the sperm cell to connect with the sperm cell memory Hammond organ and increase the male - dissemble snail ’s opportunity of fatherhood .
Until now , the war paint of this mucous secretion has rest unsung . But in a study published recently in theJournal of Biological Chemistry , Koene and his fellow worker identify , for the first time , one of the compounds in the mucous secretion . " We are taste to get some idea of how these compounds acquire , but first you need to make love what they are , " he said .
After a snail shoots its partner with its love dart , its better half will do the same ( sometimes this exchange is done simultaneously ) .
Next , the pair will mate by pushing their venereal openings together and simultaneously everting their " phallus " into each other . They then reach a spermatophore ( spermatozoon packets ) to one another , a unconscious process that can take up to 6 hours . [ # JunkOff : Why Animal private parts Are Important to skill ]
After mating , the estate escargot will go their own ways , and possibly pair with other snails .
But a 2012 subject area in the journal Animal Behavior find that the love darts ofE.quaesitahave a secondary function : It makes the snail reluctant to checkmate again .
