![]() If your snail has a pale, whitish organ on the top left of its shell opening, this is the male’s genitalia and you have a boy! If it’s absent, it’s a girl. Females are identified simply by the lack of this penis sheath. Above these gills is where you’ll see your whiteish snail’s penis sheath if it’s a boy. On the upper left side, you’ll see the snail’s gills. This is your chance to identify your snail’s gender! Look For Your Snail’s Sex OrgansĪt the top of the snail’s shell opening, you should see its lung sac, with an opening towards the right-hand side. Once you have your snail out of the water, turn it upside down.Īt first, your snail will retract deep into its shell, but eventually, it will begin to peep out again. If you can’t loosen them gently off, it’s better to wait for another time than to damage your snail! Turn Your Snail Upside Down If your snail is stuck tight onto a rock or glass don’t force your snail off. Wash your hands, roll up your sleeve and gently pluck your mystery snail from the water. Here’s how: Take Your Mystery Snail Out of the Water ![]() The best way to tell if your mystery snail is male or female is to directly observe their genital anatomy. How? They can change sex! More on that later… How To Tell if a Mystery Snail Is Male or Female But if you have a group of purely male or female mystery snails in your tank they may still be able to make babies. This means that both male and female mystery snails are needed to reproduce. Whereas many gastropods (slugs and snails) are hermaphrodites – meaning they have both male and female genitalia, mystery snails are gonochoric (they have either male or female sex organs and can’t mate with themselves). I’ve done the necessary scientific research to answer these questions, and in this article, I’ll also give you all the best ways to know if your mystery snail is a boy or a girl. And welcome to the club of weird animal sex that’ll inevitably get this column canceled.īrowse the full Absurd Creature of the Week archive here.When it comes to their sex lives, mystery snails really can be a mystery! Are they hermaphrodite? How can you know if you have a male or a female, and what about those rumors that mystery snails can change sex?! Nothing to be ashamed of, you little maverick. So the leopard slug is a double rebel, casting aside a shell while adopting one of nature’s most bizarre mating rituals. Other species have lost the shells altogether.) (Slugs, though, do indeed have remnants of their erstwhile shells: The leopard slug’s is an internal structure about the size and shape of your fingernail-unless you've got Shaq hands, I guess. Plus, making that shell requires calcium carbonate, which may be in short supply in a given environment. Slugs may not have a shell they can retreat into to avoid drying out, but they have a whole world of crevices to explore.Īlso, keep in mind that for a snail, building a shell is a tremendous energy suck-energy its slug cousins can divert elsewhere. With those big unwieldy shells, snails can’t squeeze into small spaces-say, a crack in a log or some such-where it’s nice and moist. In fairness, though, the big disadvantage to hermaphroditism is that it's more energetically costly to produce both eggs and sperm, as opposed to one or the other. Not only does it all but guarantee that any two sexually mature slugs can come together to make babies, it also means that when they do mate, both parties can end up fertilized. But why, when other slugs do the horizontal tango perfectly fine on the ground? Well, a lot of it has to do with the leopard slug’s gigantic penis, of course.įirst things first: Slugs are hermaphrodites, and that’s a neat evolutionary move. So may I present to you the acrobatic, upside-down sex of the leopard slug, done hanging from a branch on a line of slime. Or the little marsupial that has so much sex it bleeds internally and goes blind and dies. Like that of the parasite that devours a fish's tongue and mates in its mouth. If you read this column with even the slightest regularity, you know that the animal kingdom has no shortage of weird sex.
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