Week 6: ‘For an hour or so they continue to wind themselves around one another.’

Wonder spawned in: 2009
Wondered into being by: David Attenborough with the BBC Natural History Unit, from Life in the Undergrowth
Wonderspan: 4 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.

In one of the most remarkable and beautiful mating rituals in the animal world, two leopard slugs do what they must do, unaware that the humankind's favourite naturalist voyeur, David Attenborough, is watching from behind a hedge somewhere and whispering sensuously into his microphone the deeper meaning of every wriggle.  Here are ‘two danglers on a snot trapeze’, as one YouTube commentator put it, but for these four short minutes, you might yet wish you'd been born a slug.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoGn9bRWuHQ (and I'm sorry if there's an advert first)

Extra...

Microcosmos: The grass people (1996) was the first film to use a revolutionary macroscopic camera technique to bring the viewer closer to the world of invertebrates than ever before.  David Attenborough has familiarised us all with this now but at that time, these little lives had never been seen so big.  For an hour the big screen at Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds, where I saw the film in 1997, showed massive ladybirds dodging humungous raindrops in slow motion, a jumbo jet of a bee with the audience flying right behind it, and this clip of two snails glancing across a crowded forest and falling for each other.  As they got down to it, the crowded cinema released a quiet, involuntary moan of pleasure.  You'll soon see why.... slightly embarrassing though it was for all concerned.  The film is by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou and here is the two-minute clip:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA4uWR64Du4