thoughts on “What Do Snails Think About When Having Sex?”
It starts with a light, soft touch, one tentacle gently reaching out, hesitant, hopeful, hanging lightly in the air. There’s a pause. Skin touches skin. One softly strokes the other and slides closer, and then, carefully, they wrap themselves together, stroking, probing, entwining. They glisten as they move, and because they are snails, everything happens very slowly. The rubbing, the rapture, the intensity of it all—snail sex is extraordinarily lovely to look at. (If you aren’t at your office desk or on a train where people can see your screen, I’ve got one about a garden snail named Chip who’s trying to lose his virginity,
Lovely but So Dangerous
Garden snails make love in the open—on garden patios, in clearings on the forest floor—and they do it luxuriantly for one, two, three hours at a time, under the sky, where they can be seen by jays, orioles, frogs, snakes, shrews, mice, beetles, and other animals that might want to eat them. Snails can’t make quick getaways, so exposing themselves like this is dangerous, crazily dangerous. What’s going on? What’s making them so impervious, so deeply preoccupied with each other? Here’s one answer: Snail sex is very complicated. Snails have a lot to think about when they make love—because they’re hermaphrodites.
Unlike you, garden snails can produce sperm like males and carry eggs like females at the same time.
Which is both an advantage and a problem. Professor David George Haskell, a Tennessee biologist, once squatted down on a patch of forest floor and watched what you just saw in that video—a snail couple going at it—except with a magnifying glass and only a few feet from the action. What he noticed was their mood. Hot as it was, he writes in his book The Forest Unseen, “Their extended courtship and copulation is choreographed like cautious diplomacy.” Snails don’t pounce, they circle. They “slowly edge into position, always ready to pull back or realign.” Their sex is tense, charged, on, off, then on again, “a prenuptial conference over the terms of the union.” What are they negotiating about?
In most animals, snails included, sperm is plentiful, cheap to produce, and fun to unload. So one presumes that both copulating snails are eager to get that part done.
Eggs, on the other hand, are limited and hard to produce—and therefore precious. You don’t let just anybody fertilize your egg sack. So, in Haskell’s imagination, if one of these snails picks up “a whiff of disease” on the other, it may be happy to poke but is not at all interested in being poked. No one wants its precious eggs fertilized by a sick dad, so the receiving snail might lock its partner out of its opening while also trying to penetrate it. This could produce feelings of frustration, confusion, and even unfairness in the other.
“In hermaphrodites,” writes Haskell, “mating becomes fraught, with each individual being cautious about receiving sperm while simultaneously trying to inseminate its partner.” Sexually speaking, two snails with four minds—a foursome in a twosome—makes for complex fornication. That’s why snails are always on tiptoe, Haskell thought as he watched them on the forest floor: They have so much to figure out.
Hermaphrodite Abundance
So why be a hermaphrodite? Are there a lot of them? Well, here’s a surprise: They’re everywhere.
Eighty percent of the plant kingdom produces both seeds (pollen) and eggs (ovules) and can give or receive, making them hermaphroditic. They’ve learned that when the weather gets wet or cold, bees can’t be depended upon to buzz by and pollinate, so they have a we-can-do-this-ourselves backup plan.
Animals, generally speaking, are sexual, divided into male and female. But, writes Stanford biology professor Joan Roughgarden in her book The Genial Gene, if you subtract insects, which make up more than 75 percent of the animal kingdom and are not hermaphrodites, we are left, she calculates, “ … with a figure of 1/3 hermaphrodite species among all animal species.” That’s a hunk of hermaphrodites.
So Who’s a Hermaphrodite?
They’re not animals we pay much attention to (flukes, flatworms, killifish, parrot fish, moray eels, barnacles, slugs, earthworms, and tapeworms, among many others), but they are switch-hitters: They can either give or receive or switch sides during their lifetime. “All in all,” writes Roughgarden, “across all the plants and animals combined, the number of species that are hermaphroditic is more-or-less tied with the number who has separate males and females, and neither arrangement of sexual packaging can be viewed as the ‘norm.’”
Anyone who thinks that male/female is nature’s preference isn’t looking at nature, says Roughgarden. And she goes further.
No comments:
Post a Comment