A love dart is a sharp, calcareous or chitinous dart which some hermaphroditic land snails and slugs create. Love darts are both formed and stored internally in a dart sac. These darts are made in sexually mature animals only, and are used as part of the sequence of events during courtship, before actual mating takes place. Darts are quite large compared to the size of the animal: in the case of the semi-slug genus Parmarion, the length of a dart can be up to one fifth that of the semi-slug's foot.
SEM image of lateral view of a love dart of the land snail Monachoides vicinus. The scale bar is 500 μm (0.5 mm).
Drawing showing a side view of the love dart of the edible snail Helix pomatia. 1 = flared base of the dart. 2 = position of the inner cavity. 3 = longitudinal flanges or vanes. 4 = sharp tip or blade of the dart
A love dart from Cornu aspersum (garden snail) on a ruler for comparison, showing its length of 7 mm (0.28 in).
Courting Cornu aspersum snails in Ireland, the one on the right has a fired love dart embedded in its body.
Gastropods, commonly known as slugs and snails, belong to a large taxonomic class of invertebrates within the phylum Mollusca called Gastropoda.
Cepaea nemoralis: a European pulmonate land snail, which has been introduced to many other countries
The shell of Zonitoides nitidus, a small land snail, has dextral coiling, which is typical (but not universal) of gastropod shells.
The upper pair of tentacles on the head of Helix pomatia have eye spots, but the main sensory organs of the snail are sensory receptors for olfaction, situated in the epithelium of the tentacles.