Morphology of Darts
The love dart, also known as a "gypsobelum", is often made of calcium carbonate which is secreted by a specialized organ within the reproductive system of several families of air-breathing snails and slugs, mainly in terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusks within the clade Stylommatophora.
Darts can range in size from about 30 millimetres (1.2 in) long in the larger snail species, down to about 1 millimetre (0.04 in) in the smallest snails that have darts. Typically most darts are less than 5 millimetres (0.20 in) long, but they are substantial compared with the size of the animal.
There is considerable variety in both the overall shape and the cross section of the love dart. The morphology (shape and form) of the dart is species-specific. For example, individual snails of the two rather similar helicid species Cepaea hortensis and Cepaea nemoralis can sometimes only be distinguished by examining the shape of the love dart and the vaginal mucus glands (which in the anatomical diagram are marked "MG" and are positioned off the structure marked "V".)
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