If you keep pet snails and look after them well, they will repay your T.L.C. by mating: incessantly, ubiquitously and productively. The possibility of thousands of minute babies is one of the reasons why Cornu aspersum is such a successful species. If you see two of yours, side by side and motionless for hours, they are not discussing Plato or having a platonic relationship; they are enjoying a spot of rumpty-tumpy.
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| Do you fancy studying The Symposium later? Much later. |
I say "enjoy" (despite not having inside knowledge of a snail's mind) for two reasons. The first is that they do not need to mate in order to reproduce: each snail has male and female organs from birth and, as a hermaphrodite, could make it a d-i-y job. Yet our cunning garden snail instinctively knows that it is better and healthier to widen the gene pool, a perception lacking in some royal families in history. The second reason is that they spend a long time in courtship, circling each other, using their antennae to investigate the chosen partner and readying themselves for the act itself.
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| Mmmmm. Are you really my type? |
During the process each snail can release and pierce the other with a "love dart", a painful-sounding and wounding tiny arrow of calcium carbonate or chitin, coated with a mucus that alters the physiology of the recipient. Both snails exude sperm in a process that can take hours. Yet, that's it. They then go their separate ways and make no attempt to reunite or tend their eggs or offspring.