The Mating of Leopard Slugs

Well, it looks as though David Attenborough – that grand old institution of nature films – has done it again. Last night the first episode of his new series – Life in the Undergrowth – was aired on BBC TV. I sat in front of it with mouth open and eyebrows raised for most of the time at the beauty and diversity of life on spaceship Earth.

 

And nowhere more so than at the sequence of the mating of Leopard Slugs. The BBC has put a shortened (they’ve cut out the foreplay!) video clip of it up at the programme’s web site here. It’s pretty low quality (I never did think much of Real Networks technology), so you’ll miss a lot from the original. Nonetheless, something of the beauty and strangeness of this hermaphroditic mating comes across.