If you thought your dating pool was limited, spare a thought for Ned, a very rare snail unearthed in New Zealand. Due to a left-spiralling shell, Ned has a vanishingly small chance of finding a mate – a predicament that has sparked a nationwide campaign.
Nearly all common garden snails have shells that coil to the right but Ned’s left-spiralling shell is like a mirror image, resulting in a flipped shell and reversed reproductive organs – a configuration that affects roughly 1 in 40,000 snails.
Snails with shells and reproductive organs on the opposite side cannot mate with each other, so unless another similarly built snail is found, Ned will be forced to live a life of celibacy.
Ned – named after The Simpson’s famous left-handed neighbour Ned Flanders – was discovered last week in a back garden in Wairarapa, an hour north of Wellington.
Illustrator and author Giselle Clarkson was digging up vegetables in her garden when a snail dropped into the dirt. She was about to toss it away when she noticed something was a bit off.
“Something was different but I couldn’t figure it out – the first thought that went through my mind was that it was a different species,” she tells the Guardian. She soon realised that the snail’s shell coiled on the left.
“After you see something thousands and thousands of times looking one way, and then you suddenly see it the other way around, it is quite uncanny.”
Clarkson had become familiar with left-spiralling snails through her work at New Zealand Geographic magazine and immediately knew she was dealing with something special.
She made Ned a home in a fishbowl and contacted the magazine with her find. They have since launched a national campaign to find Ned a mate.
The campaign urges people in New Zealand to rummage around their gardens and parks for left-coiled snails, and asks anyone who is lucky enough to find one to get in touch.
Ned may be rare, but his plight is not the first to garner attention. In 2017, an international search was launched to find a mate for Jeremy, another lonely lefty discovered in London. Two eligible left-sided mates were discovered but made headlines when they ended up coupling with each other instead. Jeremy eventually mated with one of the pair and produced offspring with exclusively right-spiralling shells, before dying, aged two.
Ned is a common garden snail, an introduced species that is considered a pest in New Zealand’s gardens. Some gardeners may raise their eyebrows at trying to boost their population – even if it is by just a handful – but the campaign has a broader purpose.
“We’re all about trying to connect people with the environment,” said Catherine Woulfe, New Zealand Geographic editor.
“[It] is light and fun but we hope it’s also a doorway into deeper topics like gardening, understanding the natural world, and the weird intricacies of reproduction,” she said.
This month, a study revealed human connection to nature had declined by 60% in 200 years and introducing children to nature, as well as greening urban spaces were some of the best methods to help reverse the decline.
“For the last two nights my kids have happily put on their gumboots and head torches and spent half an hour pottering around the garden, snail-hunting in the dark,” Woulfe said. “That feels like a win.”
