Mating season - too gross for some species or all licentiousness allowed?!1 Snails and tarantulas.
So last year I discovered the menace (my interpretation) of garden snails and went through the usual googling and trying different internet suggestions (drowning them in beer, snail/slug poison that didn't work) and ended up plucking them and throwing out the harvesting bag in the trash. It was fairly much a clean sweep lasting 2-3 weeks. It looked like they were all gone except for one or two that I didn't think could re-populate everything. Well, a small number, not like the hundreds before, are back.
And worse, it must be mating season, like for tarantulas. The pic is only one branch, so imagine the whole lower trunk similarly covered. Now, I'm not prudish, despite detesting Public Displays of Affection, and in the pic it doesn't look like their proximity to one another is such that they are actually canoodling (see what I'm doing here), although one couple *did* seem to be stuck on each other (see what I'm doing here).
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https://www.gatewaytosedona.com/sedona-arizona-information/sedona-wildlife-and-natural-history/55-summer-rains-sound-like-love-to-arizona-tarantulas
.... ...summer rainstorms of the Arizona desert cue sexually mature male tarantulas to begin their single-minded quest to find females, marching stoically along to fulfill their romantic destinies, come rain, come Tarantula Hawk (a nasty wasp that lays its eggs in the spiders' abdomens) or come Volkswagen. This is the time of year you'll see them picking their determined way across highways, yards and occasionally into the bathrooms of Arizona homes from Tucson to Sedona, while the females wait in their burrows for their prince charming.
Luckily for the resident Sedona tarantula, pictured here, a lot of Arizonans are big fans of these hairy arachnids, and go out of their way to protect it from human-caused perils, anyway. Despite their horror-movie getup, tarantulas are pretty docile creatures, as the many passionate owners of pet tarantulas will readily attest. You really have to harass a tarantula to provoke its essentially harmless bite, and most of us just don't want to get that close.
The Apaches tell of Tarantula as one of the first beings formed by the Creator, giving him a role in the creation of the earth itself.
Aesthetic and personality issues aside, they perform a very important task in the desert ecosystem, eating cockroaches, centipedes, scorpions, rodents and other insects people consider pests. While the males have a short lifespan of perhaps a year at best after reaching sexual maturity, the females can live up to 25 years or longer for some species. ....
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they exhibit all sorts of bizarre behavior, from group sex, dual-hermaphroditism, to violent impregnation with weaponry. be careful out there 
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/150310-snails-reproduction-sex-animals-science-evolution/
(warning - scary graphic image at link 
)
