What Do Snails Think About When Having Sex?”

What Do Snails Think About When Having Sex?”

Adam and Eve or AdamEve?

She wonders, Which came first, the hermaphrodite or the male/female? We have lived so long with the Adam and Eve story—Adam first, Adam alone, Adam seeking a mate, God providing Eve—that the question seems almost 

But Roughgarden wonders if animals started as hermaphrodites …

 and then “hermaphrodite bodies disarticulate[d] into separate male and female bodies?” How would that have happened? Roughgarden cites a papershe did with her colleague Priya Iyer.

They propose that maybe the earliest animals started out as both sperm and egg carriers, and a subgroup got especially good at inserting their penises into enclosures, aiming, and directing the sperm to its target (the authors call it “home delivery”). They did this so effectively that they needed fewer and fewer eggs and essentially became sperm sharpshooters or, as we call them now, “males.”

That development gave others a chance to give up sperm altogether to concentrate on chambering their eggs in nurturing nooks, thereby becoming “females,” and so more and more animals found it advantageous to be gendered.

Ayer and Roughgarden aren’t sure this happened. They say that, on available evidence, the story can go “in either direction.”

The alternate view is almost the story you know. It’s Adam and Eve, with a twist: In the beginning, early animals were gendered—except when it was inconvenient.

If, for example, you imagine a group of, well, let’s make them snails …

 and something awful happens—there’s a terrible disease, an ice age, a new ferocious predator, or maybe a volcanic eruption…..

… so that we’re left looking at a lone individual, all by itself, looking around for a reproductive opportunity, crawling across the landscape, hoping to bump into somebody, anybody, to reproduce with, and after a long, long, anxious period, it finally sees what it’s been looking for. It crawls closer, closer, the excitement building.

But as it gets within wooing range, it suddenly sees that—oh, no—it’s the same gender!

No possibility of babymaking here. And this happens half of the time. (Statistically, that’s the likelihood.) Now instead of being your friend, male/femaleness is your enemy. What wouldn’t you give for a hermaphrodite, a he/she snail that could, in a pinch, be whatever sex you need it to be. With a hermaphrodite, you can (again statistically) always make a baby. What a relief. So maybe that’s what happened. Gender difference disappears when gender no longer helps produce more babies (and when you don’t have to stick around and be a parent).

Which is the true story? We don’t know. Maybe the only story is that nature is flexible. When gender is useful, you get genders. When not, you don’t. What we forget, being humans, is that there are so many ways to flirt, to combine, to make babies—and the world is full of wildly different ways to woo. Tony Hoagland knows this. He’s not a scientist but a poet who lives in New Mexico, and in his poem entitled “Romantic Moment,” he imagines a boy on a date who sits next to his girl imagining … How shall I put this? … how the Other Guys do it.

Romantic Moment by Tony Hoagland

After the nature documentary we walk down,
into the plaza of art galleries and high end clothing stores

where the mock orange is fragrant in the summer night
and the smooth adobe walls glow fleshlike in the dark.

It is just our second date, and we sit down on a rock,
holding hands, not looking at each other,

and if I were a bull penguin right now I would lean over
and vomit softly into the mouth of my beloved

and if I were a peacock I’d flex my gluteal muscles to
erect and spread the quills of my cinemax tail.

If she were a female walkingstick bug she might
insert her hypodermic proboscis delicately into my neck

and inject me with a rich hormonal sedative
before attaching her egg sac to my thoracic undercarriage,

and if I were a young chimpanzee I would break off a nearby tree limb
and smash all the windows in the plaza jewelry stores.

And if she was a Brazilian leopard frog she would wrap her impressive
tongue three times around my right thigh and

pummel me lightly against the surface of our pond
and I would know her feelings were sincere.

Instead we sit awhile in silence, until
she remarks that in the relative context of tortoises and iguanas,

human males seem to be actually rather expressive.
And I say that female crocodiles really don’t receive

enough credit for their gentleness.
Then she suggests that it is time for us to go

to get some ice cream cones and eat them.