Getting it on at snails pace

Pub trivia. A breeding ground for camaraderie between friends, inappropriate sexual advances toward barstaff, heated semantic debates over both correct and incorrect answers, and above all, the learning environment for many new facts.

One such fact, as discovered and then further investigated this evening, has to do with those slimy little suckers who casually roam our gardens, and in some unfortunate circumstances, find themselves squished between our toes when fetching the morning paper. I'm talking about snails - specifically, land snails.

The trivial fact central to our group's interest had to do with their mating rituals. Apparently - and I've done some light reading to confirm this - snails are commonly known to mate for up to 12 hours! That's some hardcore boning. If a snail reproduces once-a-month for the duration of their ~5 year lifespan, that equates to spending over 1.6% of their entire life balls-deep. That's the equivalent of you or I spending almost 10,000 hours of our life having sex. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure none of us are getting anywhere close to that.

Oh, and don't be so quick to correct me that only males are spending it "balls-deep" as the common land snail species are almost always hermaphrodites, meaning - of course - that they possess both male and female genitalia! Due to this, it's not uncommon for a snail to spend one mating season shagging as a "top", only to mix things up and play "catcher" the very next season.

Now here's where it gets even cooler. While we humans use things like pheromones, clothing, personal associations, misleading Tinder profiles, alcohol and narcissism to help us spread our seed, snails employ something far more medieval - the love dart. Once courtship is well under way, and the snails are getting ever-so-close to copulating, they employ what's technically known as the gypsobelum - a calcified dart no bigger than a human nail clipping, which is fired indiscriminately into their partners body, and serves to inject hormones to "prevent the other snail’s body from killing newly introduced sperm once copulation begins." (KQED) Almost like like GHB, but with less dire consequences for the female recipient.

So there you have it. Next time you're out in the garden and spot a couple of slithery-boi's entangled in one another, don't step on them. Appreciate that they're putting a lot of time and effort into their love-making, and one or both of them is probably ingesting the others' love dart.

That's what I learned today. Boy, are my dreams going to be weird tonight.