4/11/2023 0 Comments Snail penis![]() ![]() Which brings us to the sea slug with the disposable penis. The Australian species that does this is not only two-faced, it has two penises and two-tailed sperm. The first to penetrate remains male, while the other has to carry and care for their developing eggs. Some flatworms “penis fence”, which means that they fight off their partner’s penis while trying to make contact with their own. Growing and nurturing eggs is an energetic burden, and if the decision of who gets to be the male happens during the sexual act, then we have a true battle of the sexes. This brings up the idea that although slugs start out with the equipment to be male or female, they can be forced to take the role of the female. It may be that the castrator can raise his reproductive success by increasing locally the density of females.” “The apophallated slug … cannot regrow his penis and is now obligated to be a female and forced to offer eggs. I prefer to believe this quote from an actual malacologist who has considered the pay off involved: The alternative is a level of altruism that I cannot believe: slugs in love protecting their partner by making the ultimate sacrifice. When they cannot separate after sex, according to Wikipedia, “one slug gnaws off either its own, or its partner’s penis”.Įven a slug is going to hesitate about gnawing off its own penis when it could bite off another slug’s penis instead. Sometimes land slugs get stuck during the sexual act. The truth is that apophallate is a fancy word for a violent act. This seems particularly tragic in the case of the well-endowed banana slug, whose scientific name means “big penis”. The Greed prefix apo- means separation, so apophallate slugs had a penis at one point but lost it somehow. The Greek prefix a- means without, and phallate means to have a penis, so it makes sense that aphallate snails have no penises. ![]() The logistics of two penises and two vaginas creates a complex set of sexual politics, including something quite sinister in land slugs, called apophallation. When slugs have sex, they line up head to toe because their male and female bits are always on the same side of their body. Slugs are snails that have lost their shells, and this has allowed them to put their penis back where it belongs, which to say away from their head. I never got around to it, but my head was unaccountably full of questions about sex in snails, which may be why the latest news about slug sex caught my attention. I wanted to ask Winston Ponder about if the aphallate species were considered “lower” gastropods because as humans we believe that anything without a penis cannot be highly evolved. This is because snails and slugs are hermaphrodites, with both girl and boy reproductive parts, completely functional, and often in multiples. One might be tempted to call them girls, except that they all really are, even the ones with penises. That is a word that means “without penis”. Some snails have internal penises, and others are aphallate. Gastropod penises come in different forms, including the bilobed, or two-pronged version. So don’t judge scientists for mounting snail pricks on slides, and categorising them. For some reason, you are not ashamed to pluck that sexual organ and stick your nose in it. ![]() While you may recognise a rose bush from its foliage alone, you cannot be sure of the exact type of rose you until the flowers come out. The sexual organs are often the most distinctive feature of a species. (Unless you work on fish or birds, but that’s another story.) That fact is that people who name and describe species spend a lot of their time illustrating and discussing the shape of sexual organs. You might think that two days of this kind of thing would send a roomful of human beings into a paroxysm of giggles, but taxonomists are made of stern stuff. And suddenly I realised that snails have to carry their penis on their head, because if it were tucked inside their shell, how would they use it? I wondered why I hadn’t thought of this before, while Winston enlightened us about other anatomical oddities of our molluscan brothers. ![]()
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