Pulmonata
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Pulmonata or pulmonates is an informal group of snails and slugs characterized by the ability to breathe air, by virtue of having a pallial lung instead of a gill, or gills. The group includes many land and freshwater families, and several marine families.
Shells of pulmonate stylommatophoran snails in a museum collection
An artistic but scientifically incorrect version of various European land snails and slugs (one species here is not a pulmonate), their food plants and fungi, and a beetle that eats mollusks, bottom right.
Examples of Pulmonata: Achatina fulica top right, Bielzia coerulans top left, Praticolella berlandieriana center right, Megalobulimus oblongus in the center, Euglandina rosea center left, Helix pomatia bottom right & Ashmunella levettei bottom left
Love dart
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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.