Vampire Finch

Many moons ago a ship set sail around the world, it wasn’t to know it yet but it was going to change the course of history. It didn’t know this not least due to it being a boat it had a rather poorly developed sense of self. This boat was even less capable of clairvoyancy, a skill unproven in even the most sentient beings… it’s fair to say it really didn’t have the foggiest idea. Still it was so, the places it would visit, and the animals of those places would light the tinder for the greatest idea mankind has ever had… one such creature was the Vampire Finch.

Of course it just wouldn’t do for the ship’s Captain to speak to the scoundrels and hoi polloi of the crew and so it was standard practice at the time to bring a gentleman to drink sherry with them and to generally stop them from going stark raving bonkers. One rather affable fellow seemed perfect, all except for his nose thought Captain Fitzroy. The Captain was a keen phrenologist and being a scholarly and erudite chap he knew that there was no way that this fellow would make the gruelling journey around the globe with a nose that was shaped like that. Thankfully he took him anyway, what’s more he even gave him a book for the journey, a journal on how rocks metamorphose over large periods of time.

Fitzroy

A couple of weeks in their conversation turned to slavery, the Captain a conservative and pious man thought it a splendid idea, whereas the young Charles Darwin quite rightly thought it an abomination, after that they didn’t get along quite as well. Thankfully this gave the young naturalist a bit of time to think. Incidentally Charles wasn’t the actual naturalist of the Beagle, that honour fell to Robert McCormick, who eventually quit after constantly being usurped by the affable country gent.

what's wrong with my nose?

When the Beagle hit South America young Charley was quite taken by the rhea. This large flightless bird was undoubtedly smashing, but why on earth would God feel the need to create it having already made the ostrich.

Upon reaching some volcanic islands miles out to sea from the Ecuadorian coast he met some really rather marvellous species. Enormous tortoises, hawks, aquatic lizards, blue footed boobies, an array of finches and some mockingbirds. Travelling onwards to Tahiti Darwin began to catalogue his finds from the Galapagos. It was the mockingbird that first grabbed his attention, they were all from the same species, yet from each island they displayed slight, yet noticeable differences. Back in Blighty it was the finches that would really get his cogs whirring.

Darwin’s finches as they became known are of course one of the most incredible examples of how an array of animals can come from one. Years before the Beagle’s arrival a single finch had made the islands its home. From this single finch they had adapted and evolved to fill all the different opportunities that the islands have.

going anywhere nice this year sir?

The vampire finch is of course one of the more extreme examples, a subspecies of the sharp beaked ground finch it evolved on two of the smaller Galapagos Islands; Darwin and Wolf. These arid islands lacked freshwater and so the finch began to seek out moisture rich foods, it drank the nectar of the cacti it nibbles at, and rather ghoulishly it pecks at the backs of the blue footed boobie population. Strangely the blue footed boobies don’t seem to mind, it’s thought that they think it normal for small birds to come and peck them for parasites. It could of course be that they are insufferable imbeciles, the early Spanish explorers named them boobies after the Spanish for clown: Bobo.

a vampire? pecking you? well show him you're cross... Ok... STOP PECKING ME YOU LITTLE BA...!

So it was born that Charles Darwin, after twelve years deliberating in his house in the garden of England finally published the Origin of the Species, and what’s more come up with the theory of evolution the single greatest idea mankind ever had. What became of Captain Fitzroy? A devout man, though exactly where all that ‘love thy neighbour’ business fitted in with his belief in slavery is anyone’s bloody guess. Fitzroy was deeply perturbed by the cataclysmic blow dealt to his religion by Darwin’s incredible idea. An idea that could only have been dreamt up if Darwin had been ferried around some odd corners of the globe, after reading a book on how rocks change over vast periods of time. Captain Fitzroy got up one morning and took his life.

Tenrec

Hurrah! We at The Proceedings doff our caps to this intriguing chap who is quite simply like no other… for starters he’s got no balls! No, he’s not French… he’s from Madagascar… what’s that you say… a former French colonial outpost… aah starting to make sense… apart from the bit where the French actually managed to conquer somewhere of course.

Grrrrrr....

He is really rather smashing isn’t he. Yes quite… he does look like a rather dapper hedgehog… and yes… you are forgiven for thinking that he’s some relative of a snail-eating creature with no road sense… no I told you not the blasted French… he’s not related to hedgehogs. His closest relatives are in fact the golden moles, elephants and hyraxes which causes a real kerfuffle when it comes to booking a venue for family get togethers.

This tenrec chap is quite amazing, there are 30 species of them dotted around Madagascar and South Africa. They inhabit a number of different ecological niches; some favour bobbing around in rivers, others scrabbling around in bushes, some are up trees and others are underground. Remarkably they’ve grown to look quite a lot like some rather more familiar species… some are the spitting image of hedgehogs…

eeek

others are well adapted to water and look like otters…

well hello

others bound around bearing a remarkable resemblance tree shrews…

hello

…and the lowland streaked tenrec appears to have evolved to look like a German transvestite.

Guten tag handsome

Time to talk balls, more so than usual, you see these chaps lack them. They have testes of course, but they are one of the few mammals that keep them inside their body. Testicles as you know produce sperm and hormones, for mating and producing “maleness” in the body… a number of factors including facial hair, libido and propensity for pipe smoking. As the testes don’t work very well in the hot temperatures inside the body, most animals have balls that hang out of the body. A few animals, such as the whales and dolphins, keep them inside their body and have adapted elaborate systems to keep them cool. The tenrecs however just have a cool body temperature.

There is another odd body feature about these chaps in that they have a single opening for all their weeing, pooing and hanky panky. Their bum and other bits are one and the same… one hole for all functions known as a cloaca… more commonly seen in birds, reptiles and amphibians.

So there it is quite remarkable isn’t it… no not that… that the French managed to conquer somewhere.

Jumping Spiders

The jumping spiders are a rather charming bunch, one of the most numerous types of arachnid with about 5,000 species spanning the globe, though pour yourself a sherry and read on dear friend as they are far from common, and aren’t a bit like your run-of-the-mill eight-legged fiend.

don't look sad little one...

These charming spiders don’t really fit in with their peers, of course this can only endear our band of bon vivants to our eight-legged chums… what with us being the scourge of the gentleman’s clubs of Soho… those clubs that would have us back anyway.

... that's better!

The jumpers are, put quite simply, not very spider like… instead of a terrifying lolloping blur of legs… beady little eyes… venomous gnashers… attributes that turn even the most ardent animal lover into a genocidal animapath… they are instead fluffy and doe-eyed and actually make you want to pick them up for a bit of a spidery snuggle.

This sadly would be quite impossible as they tend to be about 5mm long, though these wee spiders do try and make up for their unsnugglable tiny stature by behaving in a rather precious manner. If you presented your pinkie to another type of spider it would presumably either start skedaddling towards it drooling at its gaping maw… or simply scuttle back to Hades (or the back of the refrigeration unit, whichever is nearer). The jumping spider reacts quite differently, inquisitively wondering what the blazes the big pink sausage is… and go and have an investigate.

These spiders move not surprisingly in a jerky jumping manner. Amazingly they don’t move by muscles clunking their hard shelly body around, but in fact use hydraulic action. Like a mechanical digger they utilize fluid, blood in the case of our adorable arachnid, which they pump around their system. The fluid pushes to move limbs, rather than pulls like a muscle. This rather marvellous adaption allows them to jump really rather high, up to eighty times their own height, without having to rely on big bulky muscles like the grasshopper.

The jumping spiders also have incredible eyesight, it is ten times better than that of the dragonflies… patrons of by far the best peepers in the six-legged insect kingdom. The furry bounders use their remarkable vision to stalk their prey rather than putting up big and quite frankly frightful and unwelcoming webs everywhere. Though it did confuse learned types for some time as to exactly how something with such a tiny brain can use its eyes to hunt.

Predatory mammals such as cats and ourselves have evolved incredibly complex neural pathways to deal with the amount of information our eyes bring in. The information is sifted and sorted and we can make out what we need to make out, without going stark raving bonkers at the barrage of information we behold. The jumping spiders it turns out have evolved in a very different manner, they see a very small amount at a time. While they can see as clearly as a pigeon, they could only see a speck of something at a time, if they were presented with a pigeon they would not only be annoyed at your poor taste in presents but they quite simply wouldn’t be able to comprehend its magnitude… which is incidentally a philosophical argument as to why we cannot see Gods dilly dallying around the place, they are just too enormous for our tiny minds to compute… though whether pigeons are Gods to jumping spiders is anyone’s guess…

So that’s it, the rather delightful jumping spider. I’m sure you’ll agree that they aren’t a bit like those other ruffians, our fuzzy friend with big eyes rather than big fangs, inquisitive and bouncey rather than skulking and scampering. It has even been postulated by learned types that these charismatic inquisitive creatures shouldn’t really be called jumping spiders at all… and that perhaps a better moniker for these pouncing furballs would be ‘eight-legged cats’.

Namibian fog-basking beetle

On a foggy morning you can find old Onymacris unguicularis standing on his head on top of a sand dune with his bottom in the air… no he hasn’t been drinking all night, quite the opposite, in fact he’s absolutely parched.

Water, lovely stuff, wash with it, make tea with it… life started in it and it took quite some time for him to get out of it, I know how it feels, it’s awful getting out of the tub at times…

The wet stuff is flabbergasting in its omnipresent grandeur, lakes of incomprehensible dimensions, huge rivers coarse through the land slicing through granite mountains like an unimaginably slow paring knife. The oceans are so massive that we haven’t got the foggiest what lurks at the bottom of them. Water blankets the planet, our blue Earth, covering two thirds of it… in fact it never fails to surprise us down at the Proceedings that there is in fact absolutely bugger all of the stuff… don’t believe me? Take a look;

Told you… yes really, that’s it, that wee blue droplet is all the lakes, all the rivers, all the puddles, all the seas, all the ice and soda, even all the cup a soups… all that we have… thankfully we don’t treat it too badly… back in a mo’ just going for a… oh dear lordy what are we doing?

Which brings us back to our friend the Namibian fog-basking beetle. The local bushmen refer to him as the ‘tok-tokkie’ beetle, as they attract a mate by tapping the ground with their bottoms to make a noise. Though it’s not for their fine line in rectal morse-code chat up lines that makes this chap so splendid. He’s developed a rather nifty way of getting a drink. As a sea fog rolls in of a morning the beetle presents himself to it. This is where things get clever, his carapace is made up of a series of peaks and troughs. The peaks are very attractive to water and the fog settles on them, the troughs however are waxy and hydrophobic and the water rolls off the trough and begins to form droplets. The water naturally runs down the inverted beetles body and into his mouth, smashing!

This gave the chaps down at the MoD an idea, they’ve made a series of fabrics using glass beads and waxy coatings to make huge and inexpensive fog catchers, so that the parched locals can get a glass of water. Of course getting a free drink at the best of times is obviously a good idea, but in Africa it could be a matter of life and death. While governments nowadays are happy to kick the hell out of some poor bloody country for the sake of oil… as the population crisis looms the next wars will be fought over a far more valuable fluid resource… actually I think I’ll have that drink after all.

King of Herrings

We only really know a smidgeon about this most marvellous looking beastie, the King of Herrings, a huge sword of sparkling silver resplendent with a crown… an oceanic majesty.

What we can tell you is the King of Herrings is the World’s longest fish, up to an incredible 12 metres long. It’s a type of Oarfish and more than one researcher has said that it gives off electric shocks when touched. A group of frogmen recently reported that it moves by undulating its enormous fin along its back, keeping its body quite straight. And that’s about it… it’s fair to say we know bugger all about this beauty.

So when it came to an evening talk on this King of Herrings we were rather stumped as to what to say down at The Proceedings. Many people, new ages types mainly, wag their finger at us men of science and point out that ‘we think we’ve got it all worked out’ well no we haven’t… it’s actually that we are rather fascinated about this wonderful and intriguing place we call home. This of course led us to chat about what we don’t know about, a subject that could fill the entire library of The Proceedings of the Ever so Strange thricefold.

We don’t know about the Universe, most of it appears to be missing for a start off, and the whole thing should be falling apart… but it isn’t. We haven’t got a clue if there is life out there… though according to the Drake equation there should be about 10,000 life forms in the Universe who have the ability to communicate… and therefore countless others. We certainly don’t know if something was trying to communicate with us when a thirty-seven-second long signal came from Sagittarius in 1977, the so called Wow! signal after the astronomer on watch couldn’t help but scribble his excitement by the side of the feedout.

We don’t even know about our planet… what the weather will do from day to day or when a volcano will erupt or the ground will shake. We haven’t got the foggiest how many organisms there are, at best guess we think there is somewhere in the order of between 2 and 100 million… pretty accurate I’m sure you’ll agree. We don’t know about what is at the bottom of the ocean or what made a huge noise there in the Summer of 1997… a noise that was heard by sensors 4,800 miles apart… a bloop almost certainly organic in origin… a noise that could only have been made by something much much bigger than any living thing ever known.

We don’t know what causes ice ages every 100,000 years, indeed we are actually in an ice age now, an ice age that despite only seeing an average fall in temperatures of about two degrees it was enough to turn the Earth into a snowball. We certainly don’t know what will happen as the temperature will rise by four degrees in this century… though I’d warrant it’s not bally good news.

We’ve no idea why we sleep or pick our nose, we don’t know why we have pubic hair and speaking of hair sprouting up in funny places we have absolutely no idea what the point in teenagers is… when all other apes seem to quite sensibly move smoothly into adulthood. We don’t know why humans kiss, it’s certainly not genetic, there are theories that it dates from ancient times when a mother would mush up food for the wee ones in her mouth… but who could ever know. We don’t even know why we love…

Though we at the Proceedings of the Ever so Strange would love to know about love and whopping great fish and weather and aliens… what’s more we look forward to finding out just a smidgeon about them…

Boobies

Boobies… we at the Proceedings love boobies… big boobies… small boobies… brown boobies… boobies; a genus of seabirds in the Sulidae family.

Oh you thought… no, sorry… though you might want to ask the Major about his collection of anthropological etchings. Of course we are talking about the rather enchanting sea bird from the Pacific. Their name is of course rather rude… yes as you suspected it is a bastardization of an old Spanish naval slang for a half-wit or clown. Naturally among sailors these affable birds were really rather popular. They would comically drop in to say ‘how do you do’ on ships that were mid-voyage. What sailor couldn’t be taken in by this birds comical looks, bold as brass personality, waddling gate… and of course being a hell of a lot tastier than a biscuit full of weevils and a flask of your own urine can’t have done much to decrease their charisma.

Though it’s not for any of these reasons that this smasher is propelled into the Proceedings. It’s actually because of his poo…. and to be fair the poo of a couple of his chums; the Peruvian cormorant and the Peruvian pelican… a triumvirate of the most important pooers the world has ever seen.

The Incas are of course famous for building cities of gold that are even more difficult to find than a monogamous Frenchman. What is less lauded is their love of bird poo. The Inca revered the islands of fertilizer and anyone who disturbed the holy birds were subject to the death penalty. The Inca, in their native Quechua, referred to this white stinky gold as ‘wanu’. The Spanish of course, not happy with merely oppressing the natives, felt they should also spray them with spittle… so changed the name to ‘guano’.

i say old boy... i think you might have trodden in something there

Of course it wasn’t just the natives that thought the poo rather smashing. Step forward the great poo rush of the 1800’s. Fortunes were born from the bums of seabirds. In 1858 alone Great Britain imported 300,000 tonnes of Peruvian guano, mainly for growing turnips. The British Empire pretty much ran the whole guano empire, rather annoying our American chums, and indeed it became US law that if an American found an island full of bird poo he was allowed to keep the entire island… as long as he sent all that poo back to the US.

Between 1840 and 1880 the Peruvian guano boom was at its highest height. Twenty million tonnes were exported earning the country two billion dollars, indeed the president of Peru was said to be more important than the president of the United States at the time. Sadly, with all the business acumen of Jack on his way to market, he thought a windfall of two billion dollars not enough to bolster his country’s coffers and promptly took out a number of crippling loans. Of course wars soon broke out over the precious poo, resulting in a number of bloody wars culminating in poor blooming Bolivia being the only landlocked country with an active navy… and it wasn’t just Bolivia that was left in a right bloody mess. No, I’m not talking about the ‘islas de la poo’ either. It’s often cited that many of South Americas woes are because of this financial mismanagement of such a precious early resource.

All of which of course the daft bugger the booby, and indeed his poo, is utterly oblivious to.

Of course we’d like to finish the Proceedings tonight by saying that of course our educational body is based in the heart of the British Empire, and we’d like to add that we, unlike the blasted Spanish, would never do such a wonderful bird the injustice of giving it such a silly name. No… no… no… it would take a right bunch of tits to do that.

Komodo Dragon

This is the story of an island giant… no not that film about that big bugger off monkey… but huddle up dear reader as here is a tale every bit as incredible and a monster every bit as abominable…

In 1492 Martin Behaim covered a metal ball with a map and thought it rather splendid, he called it the ‘Erdapfel’ and though it lacked the Americas and even had a few made up countries for good measure, it was the first globe. The second oldest globe is of an unknown origin… the Hunt-Lenox globe. It is dated variously between 1503 and 1510 and is emblazoned with the really rather smashing description across Asia… HC SVNT DRACONES… HERE BE DRAGONS.

Remarkably it is the only time that such an inscription has appeared on any antiquated map… though dragons indeed here there be… it just took us a while to find them.

In 1908 a pioneering Dutch aviator crash landed into the shark-infested waters in a far flung arm of the East Indies. He thought himself the luckiest chap alive as he had managed to cheat a certain death… he quickly re-thought his position however when he found himself shacked up on an island with slobbering three-metre-long man-eating lizards. Somehow our Dutch friend escaped this devil of a pickle, and three months later upon his return he told everyone he knew about his incredible escapades on the island of the dragons. Unfortunately living in the Netherlands it was presumably commonplace for people to hallucinate fantastical creatures most days of the week and everyone thought him quite the silly sausage.

Years after our hapless Dutch friend crashed, skins and bones of a Komodo made it to Java where a learned type wrote a paper about them. Though it wasn’t until 1926 that the world famed explorer W. Douglas Burden put forward an expedition to catch a glimpse of the magnificent beasts. Unfortunately it still being the Victorian period ‘catching a glimpse’ generally meant filling them with lead pellets. Thankfully some Komodo were a bit luckier and W. Douglas Burden took a couple of live ones back to civilization.

This massive lizard, like the rest of the monitor lizards, first evolved in Australia. Fifteen million years ago Australia rather clumsily bumped into Southeast Asia, though no one knows if it was because he’d been drinking again, sloshing some of its native monitor lizards into the islands of the Pacific ring of fire. It is because of this collision that we are fortunate enough to have this incredible abominable lizard. So how did this monstrous chap get so big? Well on the tiny island of Komodo it was subject to those tricksy laws of evolution, growing huge… an example of Island gigantism… yes much like that massive movie monkey … and gigantic they are… more than 3 metres long in some cases. What’s more they have a great big mouth full of nasty bugs that means if you are unlucky enough to get bitten by the sod then you slowly succumb to blood poisoning. Recently it has been found that Komodo dragons have venom glands in the lower jaw, this venom causes shock and general wooziness… as if shock and wooziness was needed when you have just been bitten by a 3-metre-long lizard.

Komodo dragons wouldn’t think twice about gobbling you up either as these sods are man-eaters; in fact they’ve killed 5 people since 1974. These devilish cads are even partial to a bit of cannibalism, 10% of their diet is young Komodos, who not surprisingly have decided to live in trees. While eating babies is frowned upon in most societies it’s necessary for Komodo as they have very few medium sized prey on the islands.

All big horrible cannibalistic man-eating lizards can have a sweet side though and it turns out these dragons are actually remarkably intelligent. Not a very lovable trait in an enormous venomous man-eating lizard you’d think… but they actually like to play. They even recognize their individual keepers and can even be taught to do tricks. Unlike a certain King Kong… which let’s not forget to mention… was a film that was originally inspired by the story of the discovery of a big bugger off lizard.

Baiji

The Baiji has made a terrible mistake, which to be honest has only endeared himself to The Proceedings. He spent tens of thousands of years evolving to live in a lovely river, only for someone to bugger up all his hard work in the space of a few decades… the Baiji’s home has had such an extensive buggering he’s unfortunately one of the rarest animals on the planet… indeed if he is alive at all.

The Baiji is one of four species of river dolphin that have evolved independently around the world. This one hails from the Yangtze river… hence its common name ‘The Yangtze River Dolphin’… well I thought that was funny… its Latin name is Lipotes vexifillier which means “left behind flag bearer”… really lost on that one. Though perhaps this lovely dolphin’s oddest monicker is its nickname; “Goddess of the River”. No, no I’m not saying the Baiji isn’t entrancing… I’m saying that this heavenly title seems a tad incongruous. In fact such a name can only really be relevant if it’s common practice for the Yangtze locals to deafen, poison and generally mistreat their goddesses… perhaps buggering about vengeful deities is the only way to explain why the river is so bloody awful in the first place.

Given the choice most animals wouldn’t have evolved in China, after millions of years of unadulterated bliss in one of the most beautiful places on the planet, suddenly they became assailed from every blooming direction. When they weren’t being poisoned from pollution, they were being eaten. When they weren’t being ground up into little placebos they were… actually that’s bally well enough. Of course the absolute worse place in China that an animal could choose to evolve in is the Yangtze.

Now a huge centre of commerce, the Yangtze is about as peaceful as a Beijing bell factory, and simply put the Baiji is more out of place than a Scot at a charity fundraiser. Of course this lovely dolphin wasn’t always so incongruous. It evolved in a rather muddy river and so forewent the need for sight. While it gave up trying to squint its way through the sediment rich Yangtze it evolved a highly developed sense of hearing. Of course back in the day he was having a lovely time, because his hearing was so acute he was able to bimble around the great river quite happily… right up until the point that the motor engine was invented. Now the dolphin’s home has circular saws whizzing through it… circular saws that render the poor sod absolutely blind.

What’s more the pollutants and other gubbins sloshing downriver have all added up to make sure that this river dolphin is done for. The Baiji is now so rare in fact that it’s been declared functionally extinct, despite someone thinking they might have seen one a couple of years back, it’s got no chance, without wanting to go into gene flow and population dynamics i hope you’ll be satisfied with me just saying the poor bugger is done for… even if there are a couple of dolphin goddesses left the chance of them even meeting each other in the Hades like depths of the Yangtze sadly seems really rather unlikely…

Star Nosed Mole

Meet this marvellous chap and his rather splendid nose… said to be the most sensitive appendage in the entire animal kingdom.

The Star Nosed Mole lives in swamps in Northern America and swims through the sloshy mud. It’s a good swimmer and is often found skedaddling around the bottom of streams and ponds looking for some grub. This chaps magnificent hooter doesn’t really give anything a chance either that fleshy star will feel anything that wiggles by. What it doesn’t feel it will certainly smell… even underwater… incredibly the Star Nosed Mole is in fact the only mammal that can smell underwater. It does this by blowing large bubbles out of its nose and quickly snuffling them back up along with any smelly smells. His eyes for the record are about as much use as Turkish cricket team… in fact they can only just perceive the difference between light and dark.

He may be blind-as-a-bat-that-has-been-buried-in-a-swamp-with-a big-distracting-nose-in-front-of-its-next-to-useless-eyes… but this mole’s stupendous nose more than makes up for that. It has twenty-two wee pink fleshy tentacles, which grow as if a bud unfurling like a wibbly flower. His superb conk is covered in incredibly sensitive organs called Eimer’s organs… 25,000 highly acute little nodules that relay information back to his brain. There are 100,000 nerves connecting his nose to his brain, six times as many as there between the human brain and the hand, which gives you an inkling as to just how much they can feel around a swamp. In fact it would be fair to say the Star Nosed Mole’s nose is in fact its eyes… it even waves it around constantly much like we gaze around looking for food and mates and our pipe tobacco and what not.

One more thing on this terrific chap, it turns out he’s the fastest eater in the animal kingdom. In eight milliseconds it can figure out if something is food, and if it is indeed edible it will be slurped up within 120 milliseconds, three times faster than the blink of an eye. Of course only the Scots have been recorded eating faster, it’s just that no one in their right mind could define their cuisine as edible.

Leopard Slug

Meet the positively peachy Leopard Slug, or in latin Limax maximus which means ‘Great Slug’!

These nocturnal spotty slimers are up to 25cm long, which makes them one of the largest land slugs in the world. Though it’s not their size that get these chaps into The Proceedings of the Ever so Strange… no… no… no.

Nor is it because they are one of the few carnivorous slugs, zipping around about four times faster than other slugs to gobble them up. It’s not because this slug has a shell… many slugs do hidden away in their body a tiny reminder of their evolutionary past. Or as Darwin exquisitely put it ‘rudimentary organs may be compared with the letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation’.

Rather weird this slimy fellow is for many reasons, but there is one reason it has caused a right hullabaloo down at The Proceedings.

i say i'm looking for a certain type of lady

You see it turns out that the Leopard slug has a sex life that would make the Dutch blush. They court for hours, beginning by circling around each other slobbering all over their respective partner. After the hours of licky foreplay, the rather adventurous couple skedaddle up a tree, entwine around each other before lowering themselves down on a mucus string.

Once suspended in mid air…. actually while we’re here yes I do realize it does sound like I’ve hit the Claret pretty hard, but I swear this is all true… anyway… once in position, spinning around on their mucus string, a huge penis comes out of both of their heads, slugs of course being hermaphrodites.

racy stuff!

I know by now you think I’m actually having one of my opium flashbacks from my time in Kandahar, or even just had my fill of the laudanum I picked up in Harrods, still absolutely honestly this is what they do. They slide down their mucus string, and in mid air each with its enormous penis unsheathed from their head, their kilt-tilters tangle and wind around one another, much in the same way as the slugs themselves. The penises fan out into a rather smashing flower-like structure and they can at this stage exchange sperm. Sometimes the penises will become so entangled that apophallation is the only way to go… one will chew off the others penis. The de-tallywhackered slug will still be able to mate, just only as a lady. Usually, and indeed thankfully, it doesn’t always have to come to this. They will end mating by dropping down to the floor, and bimble off into the night to lay thousands of eggs.

So there it is Limax maximus… a really really great slug!