Tangled Bank: Writings from Orion

Carnal Knowledge

47 Carnal Knowledge I had real compunction about dispatching them in the depth of their passion.They were beautiful utterly merged—and they were stunning in their sheer physical exuberance. But letting them live would have serious consequences, as I had learned bitterly once before. It was some fifteen years before that I came upon a courting pair of the great gray beasts, the first I’d ever seen. I recognized them from their handsomely spotted hides, and remembered what I had read about their astonishing sexual behavior. So I placed the creatures in a terrarium to watch them. But they escaped post-coitus, and our home precincts have been populated with their voracious offspring ever since. I am speaking of Limax maximus, arguably the handsomest of the large, shell-less land mollusks. Sleekly proportioned, kitten-gray, symmetrically mottled with dramatic black spots, and enormous—sometimes exceeding six inches—the leopard slug is an animal whose beauty must appeal to even the most fastidious slime-o-phobe.If only it were native! But,like the black and rusty Arion ater, which gobbles the garden in its teeming thousands, L. maximus originated in Europe. It is one of hundreds of alien species that, having co-evolved with humans over many thousands of years in the Old World,proved pre-adapted for disturbed habitats in NorthAmerica.So this striking animal is despised as the starling of the slugs, no more loved than the exotic zebra mussels that clog our waterways. Slugs have a hard enough time with their public relations,but when they are as devastating on the garden as this large herbivore,they haven’t a chance at mercy, even from a sympathetic naturalist. Even still, Limax maximus practices one of the most dramatic sexual unions I know, thereby seducing our reluctant attention. Like other slugs, the species is hermaphroditic. Every adult both receives and donates spermatazoa, a lifestyle that might be considered highly progressive. But they do not gather in knots of two or three individuals to fuse gonads among the leaf litter as does A. ater. TheTangled Bank:Writings from Orion 48 Nor do they engage in mutual penetration with mammoth penises as our indigenous banana slugs do. Instead, great gray garden slugs have contrived a copulatory routine so Byzantine as to raise the most jaded eyebrows. And raise is the right verb,for these slugs begin their union by climbing a tree trunk or a wall to a high point, then circling for an hour or more, mutually caressing with their tentacles, nipping, and secreting copious gummy mucous.Then, gluing a sticky launching pad to the surface, they drop into the abyss on a shared bungee cord of congealed slime. (One of the greatest attributes of mollusk mucous is that it can be slick as greased glass one second, sticky as super glue the next—an engineering feat no laboratory has successfully duplicated.) There the lovers dangle, like two climbers moved to merge in mid-belay. Such was what we beheld on a recent midnight, upon going out to the back porch to feed the cats. Ever since that first experiment in voyeurism and the subjects’ consequent escape, L. maximus has frequented our porch and the adjacent gardens.To their detriment and the cats’ patent disgust, they come to the cat food more faithfully than to any slugbait but beer. However, these two fine leopards were sliding up the wall of the house above the catfood dish, more intent on sex than kibbles.We decided to let them reach the ceiling and bungee away, certain we could contain them after witnessing the act.They made remarkable progress in their eagerness. When we checked a few minutes later, they were already slung and linked, their cables pasted to the clapboard wall,their embrace suspended just above the dish.And there stood Firkin the cat, peacefully munching, completely oblivious to the sex play unfurling inches above her head. The strand hung some three feet, roping the lovers upside down.They wrapped around each other in a double helix so intertwined that we stiff bony vertebrates could only regard their full-body wrap with envy and awe.They dangled and spun, first this way, then that, as their soft exertions spiraled their gyre. And all the while their extruded milky penis sacs— half their total length—pushed out behind their heads, mingling in a clot of blending zygotes. First palm-like, then feathery, these creneled genitals pulsated and throbbed like sea...