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The birds, the bees, and the educated fleas all have their own takes on romance, or so it is said. Before you pitch the woo this Valentine's Day, heed some love lessons from the animal kingdom.
Love hurts. Blind like Cupid, garden snails -- Cantareus aspersus -- are also similarly armed. Their slow-paced courtship begins as the hermaphrodites circle each other, touching and biting each other's lips and genitals ("It really looks like kissing," says Ronald Chase, a biologist at McGill University, in Canada), and gathers steam as the snails use hydraulic pressure to fire "love darts" -- tiny calcified harpoons -- at each other before mating. "It's kind of a nasty thing to do to your love partner," says Mr. Chase. But, he says, research suggests that an impaled snail will retain and produce more offspring from the shooter's sperm than a snail who leaves the reciprocal insemination unscathed.
It's a battle of the sexes ... Scientists at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, recently discovered a new species of marine flatworm, Imogine lateotentare, that engages in penis fencing, reported The Sydney Morning Herald. Hopped up on oysters, the two-centimeter flatworms, which have both male and female parts, reproduce by stabbing each other with their genitals. The first to penetrate transfers sperm to the de facto female and goes on to joust with other flatworms while...