BLUE POOTLE – AUGUST 06

By Aliya Whiteley

On Sunshine and Slime Trails

Today the Blue Pootle is hot.

I don’t mean that in a put on a slinky outfit, pout for the camera and fiddle with it in a Photoshop kind of a way. I mean it in an extra strong deodorant and an addiction to Fruit Pastille ice lollies kind of a way. It’s flipping well hot out there. It’s so hot that even my eyelashes are hot. They’re drooping.

So quickly, before I fall asleep, what is the deal with this hot business? Is it climate change and should we all be despondent? Or is it a heatwave and should we all be at the beach with our tubes of factor 3000 and our sarongs tied low over our less than perfect thighs? Alternatively: men, feel free to conjure relevant images of yourselves in swim trunks that cling to your undercarriage and the shame of an increasingly hairy back.

On the local news programme, which I happened to catch only when my baby daughter sat on the remote control and summoned the television to electrical life with best Victor Frankenstein glee on her part, the farmers were saying how they’re going to give up growing wheat and start growing apricots instead. Apricots thrive better in much hotter weather, whereas the wheat is wilting. Try saying that to a microphone thrust into your face by an unsympathetic local news reporter. So they seem pretty convinced that the hot weather is here to stay.

Always trust a farmer, my imaginary friend Ethelbert the turquoise slug used to say. They know about seeds and soil and growing. They understand livestock. They can read the weather. So I feel I must side with the farmers on this one: it’s time to order several new bikinis, a solar panel and a pool for the back garden. Plus I’ll have to get a taste for apricots, although I’d rather have toast any day.

I’m making light of the situation, but obviously this is extremely bad news for the entire world. Just in case you haven’t fully grasped the ramifications of the situation, I’ll elucidate: Pootles don’t work well in hot weather. They can’t think of interesting things to comment on, or rants to draw out to past breaking point until anything relevant they might have said has ended up as a spaghettily tangled mess on the powder blue carpet. As you can see, I’m running on empty here. I need inspiration, and it ain’t gonna come from apricots.

So, as a desperate fallback measure I’m going to pass on some useful information to you instead. I began to wonder about this topic when Ethelbert first appeared to me during the heatwave of 1976. He was a younger slug then and given to thoughts of love. If I had known how very well endowed he was I might have considered dating him myself, even though I was only two years old. Anyway, this article comes from The Field Guide To The Slugs and makes for most enjoyable reading:

Although slugs are hermaphroditic, each animal equipped with both male and female reproductive organs, they mate with themselves only if no other slugs are around. Given a choice, they seek partners with whom to trade genetic material, a move that, by favoring the passage of chromosomes from both parents to the offspring, nurtures a healthier pool of slug genes. The actual exchange of sperm is preceded by an elaborate courtship ritual, which supposedly reduces the chance of two individuals of separate species mating and giving rise to hybrids.

During courtship, two slugs will circle each other ... with both partners engaged in ritualized bouts of lunging, nipping, and sideswiping with their tails. The two slugs may also display their disproportionately large sex organs. The great grey garden slug's penis is nearly half its total body length. In fact, penis size is reflected in the scientific name of one banana slug species: dolichophallus -- Latin for "long penis."

"The sight of a courting pair of slugs majestically circling one another ... while they solemnly wave their oversized penises overhead puts the most improbably athletic couples of Pompeii and Khajuraho into a more appropriate and severely diminished perspective," note researchers C. David Rollo and William G. Wellington. "Athletic" is an even more appropriate adjective for great grey garden slugs, which are able to copulate in midair, suspended by stretchy strands of mucus up to 17 3/4 inches long.

As courtship progresses, a banana slug pair intertwines ... stimulating each other for several more hours. Their genital areas swell as the pair move even closer together. Penetration takes place, then each slug alternately releases and receives sperm.

Now the slugs must disengage -- a challenge for two animals so amply endowed and thoroughly covered in sticky mucus. After long bouts of writhing and pulling, the pair may resort to ... apophallation. Translated, this means that one slug gnaws off the penis of the other.

Is there an advantage to such odd behavior? Yes, according to Adrian Forsyth, author of A Natural History of Sex. The apophallated slug, says Forsyth, "cannot regrow his penis and is now obligated to be a female and forced to offer eggs." ... In other animal species, gigantism has been a precursor to extinction. Only by submitting to the shears can banana slugs maintain their inordinate organs.

Let me end by telling you that Ethelbert has been looking a bit sheepish lately: I think we can all guess what happened to him. He messed with the wrong slug. Suddenly I’m beginning to feel a little happier about the hot weather. If that’s the worst we humans have to contend with, then we got lucky, huh?

Word of the Day: Nepenthes. A drug or potion bringing welcome forgetfulness.

Go here to provide the Pootle with feedback, start a discussion about the burning issues addressed above, talk about her new novel, Three Things About Me, or simply to say hi.