The weird reason “lefty” snails are doomed to stay single forever
New Zealanders are searching their gardens to find a soulmate for ‘Ned’, a snail with a rare mutation that hampers its chances at finding love.
New Zealand Geographic has put out a call to people across the Pacific nation to help find Ned, a lefty snail, a soulmate. However, the odds are long that one can be located.
Ned was found by Giselle Clarkson, author and illustrator of a nature book, and self-described ‘observologist’, while she was working in her garden last month. She knew right away that the little guy was not like other snails.
“Something looked off. It was weird… For a second, I wondered if it was a different species or something,” she shared with New Zealand Geographic. But she soon realized that she had found a lefty, and she got in touch with her friends at the organization to see if they could help avoid him having a celibate life.
Why lefty snails have a hard time finding a one true love
Ned, named after the left-handed character Ned Flanders in ‘The Simpsons’, has a rare genetic mutation that causes a snail’s shell to spiral to the left. The condition shows up in roughly one out of every 40,000 snails.
Furthermore, left-spiraling snails cannot mate with right-spiraling snails as their sex organs are on opposite sides of their heads making it “impossible for a righty and a lefty to get it on.”
Fortunately, despite the rarity of lefty snails, the situation isn’t completely dire. Snails are hermaphrodites, they have both male and female sex organs. So despite the slim odds, should someone find another left-spiraling snail, Ned could find his true love.
Additionally, this time of year in New Zealand is “just like maximum snail right now. They’re everywhere. You can basically pick up handfuls of them,” explained Clarkson.
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