【英语时差8,16】蜗牛（上）（在线收听）

No matter the species, mating rituals are pretty weird. Take the praying mantis. After an intimate tryst, the female mantis bites its partner’s head off. But when it comes to sexual hijinks, nothing beats the garden snail. During sex, garden snails often pierce each other with miniature darts. Any way you slice it, garden snail mating is bizarre. For starters, these members of the mollusk family are hermaphrodites, meaning that garden snails can both impregnate and become pregnant. Furthermore, since only a small part of a snail’s body extends outside its shell, it carries both sets of genitals–male and female–up front near the head.