Sentence examples for love darts from inspiring English sources

Love darts increasingly look like male instruments that are designed to manipulate females, although a role in mate choice cannot be excluded.

"Love" is certainly a word you could use to describe how Ms. Stewart feels about her gastropod herd, but after years of caring for and harvesting thousands of snails, she has figured out that there's nothing romantic about letting one of those love darts pierce your skin.

Zoologist Ronald Chase of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who studies the use of "love darts" in hermaphroditic land snails (ScienceNOW, 6 July) and sees his share of bizarre mollusk mating, calls this version "very strange".

And among some African species recently discovered by Dr Rowson, things get even more bizarre: some have spiny or thorny genitalia, or arrow-like love darts "that make the mating of leopard slugs look tame", he says.

SEM images of love darts from eight different species of pulmonate land snails.

Opisthobranch gastropods are hermaphrodites, as are the pulmonates, however opisthobranchs do not have love darts.

As part of their ritual of copulation, snails shoot each other with something known as a "love dart".

When the two partners come together, each drives a calcareous dart (the so-called love dart) into the body wall of the other with such force that it is buried deep in the other's internal organs.

Some slugs, she reports gleefully, mate by way of what is known even in scientific papers as a "love dart", a small blade of chitin or cartilage that may have provided the Greeks with the inspiration for Eros's arrow.

Some species of snail, which have both male and female organs, stab each other with a calcium carbonate "love dart" that may be more than 1 centimeter long.

They observed hundreds of mating Helix aspersa snails and selected 18 that had successfully stabbed their partner with a love dart, as well as 21 that had shot and missed.