EVERYTHING YOU NEVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SLUGS

Slate has dedicated its considerable resources to a "series on revolting creatures". And why not? We spend so much time considering what's revolting about humanity, so let's just indulge in a bit of species schadenfreude. Consider the ickiness of the slug:

The slug physique is not appealing—one broad muscular foot topped with a gut (thus the class name gastropod). But what makes slugs so uniquely unattractive is their slime—a soft, slippery mucous coating that allows the animals to undulate along the ground with wavelike contractions...

In a recently published volume of Samuel Beckett's letters, the glum playwright remarks, "I'm depressed the way a slug-ridden cabbage might be expected to be."

Yes, we've all been there. It's Monday, after all, and I've got the blues like slug-glossed arugula. And now there's this:

It can take a while for two slugs in heat to find each other, but once that happens, the pair might engage in foreplay for hours, sampling chemical secretions on each other's surfaces. The nibbling often leads to biting and tail lashing. Most slugs mate on the ground, but Limax maximus, aka the leopard slug, produces a strong cable of slime by which the two lovers dangle from a tree. In most kinds of slug, the penis is about half the length of its body.

Why create mythical monsters when there's so much that's gross right on our very doorsteps, or dangling from trees? But of course we all witnessed such slug tawdriness in the film "Microcosmos", which pretends to be a film about insect interactions, but in fact left this viewer rather hot under the collar.

All of the species listed in the Slate series are repulsive by design--gooey or loathsome out of self-preservation. This reminds me of those evolutionary reasons for why we find other creatures so cute:

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

It seems I have an infantile desire to share this cuddly film about the science of cute. I wish I could protect it from the evils of the blogosphere: