Love Will Tear Us Apart: Traumatic Mating Through Consumption of Body Parts in a Sea Slug

Abstract

Many sea slugs bear numerous finger-like dorsal projections called cerata, at the tip of which they can store intact nematocysts (organelles usually with stinging function) from their cnidarian preys. In a recently published paper in Ecology, we showed that during mating of the sea slug Phidiana lynceus, partners may ingest cerata from each other, a hitherto unreported kind of extragenital traumatic mating. Given that this behavior is apparently not related to a “collateral damage” (e.g., injection of substances into the partner), this finding may shed some light into “adaptive harm” hypotheses that aim to explain the evolution of traumatic mating. Photo credit: Alvaro E. Migotto. Photo credit: Licia Sales. Photo credit: Licia Sales. These photographs illustrate the article “Love will tear us apart: traumatic mating through consumption of body parts in a sea slug” by Licia Sales, Alvaro E. Migotto, and José Eduardo A. R. Marian published in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.2849