![]() “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 payoff involved: The alternative is a level of altruism that I cannot believe: slugs in love protect 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 appellate snails have no penises. The logistics of two penises and two vaginas create a complex set of sexual politics, including something quite sinister in land slugs, called appellation. 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 if the appellate 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 appellate. 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 categorizing them. For some reason, you are not ashamed to pluck that sexual organ and stick your nose in it. While you may recognize a rose bush from its foliage alone, you cannot be sure of the exact type of rose 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. At least they can see what they are doing when the deed is being done.Īnd suddenly I realized 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. The snail penis looks like a fleshy dreadlock growing right near their stalked and googly eyes. A cephalic penis doesn’t have a head, it grows out of your head. I learned for the first time that many snails have an external cephalic penis. As strange as this sounds to us, the concept of the detachable penis is not a surprise to malacologists, which is what we call people who study slugs, snails, octopuses, and other soft creatures.Īctually, I was thinking about snail sex a couple of weeks ago because our department ran a taxonomic workshop where, among other expert presentations, a malacologist named Winston Ponder told us how to tell one gastropod from another. In 2013 a group of Japanese scientists published a paper describing a sea slug with a disposable penis.
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