It began when a retired scientist at the Natural History Museum in London told me that he had found a rare garden snail with a left-coiling shell. In 20 years of researching the genetics of snails at universities around the world, I had never found a “lefty” garden snail. My first thought was that this snail could be used to discover what makes most other snail shells coil clockwise. As with our previous work, in which we showed that snails and other animals may use the same genes to define left and right, perhaps the new snail might contribute to understanding human asymmetry. For example, we usually have our heart to the left, but rare individuals are reversed.
The problem was that it is very difficult for lefty snails to mate, because they not only have a reversed shell but also genitals on the opposite side of their head to normal snails. Imagine trying to shake hands with your right hand with someone who insists on using their left. It doesn’t work. How could we understand the genetics if we could not get offspring from the lefty?
I kept the snail in my office at the University of Nottingham, where I am an associate professor, proudly showing it off to visitors, but not knowing what to do with it. Then I realised that we could use the media to find another lefty snail. Our press officer, Emma, convinced me that we needed a name. Jeremy immediately came to mind, after Jeremy Corbyn, because both were lefties and commonly found in the garden or allotment.
We tentatively approached the science editor for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. He wanted me and the snail in the studio the next day. I asked the public to get involved by searching hedgerows, borders and plant pots for this rare version of the common snail, asking them to email or tweet a photo using the hashtag #snaillove. Stepping out of the studio, I was barraged by telephone interviews. Global news stories followed. I also received lots of snail photos, but usually from people looking at them the wrong way around, or with cameras in selfie mode.
I had been sceptical about the possible level of interest, reasoning that the public are just not that into snails. But in the end, it didn’t matter. They care about love.
About a month after the first interview, I heard reports about two other lefty snails – one kept by a snail enthusiast in her bedroom in Ipswich, and another by a snail farmer and restaurateur in Mallorca. Jeremy took an unfruitful trip to Ipswich (no mating, despite interest from the other snail, Lefty).
A few months later, we got the three snails together (by snail mail; easily done with a small cardboard box and some dry tissue) at the university. Unfortunately, Jeremy was left shell-shocked after being given the cold shoulder by the two other suitors. “Gastropod love triangle tragedy”, read one headline; the “Sexual misery of the English snail”, snarked a French paper.
As the scientist meddling in this unusual love triangle, I tried to remain disinterested. But I also persisted in trying to find a match for Jeremy.
There was to be a happy ending, of sorts. One Sunday, I popped into the lab and found Jeremy mating with the Spanish snail, Tomeu.
Jeremy became a father, but died soon afterwards. I froze his body (to preserve the DNA) and now have his shell on my desk. There is a plan to return it to the Natural History Museum.
Over three years, citizen scientists and snail farmers found about 40 more lefty snails. Together, we hatched nearly 15,000 offspring. Jeremy’s descendants were all right-coiling. The ironic conclusion (as a geneticist) was that Jeremy’s unusual coil probably originated from an accident during early development, rather than an inherited condition. Instead, his legacy was in highlighting the common links between ourselves and snails. While humans are outwardly symmetrical, internally we are asymmetric like snails, nearly always going the same way.
I have been fortunate to work in Cuba, Japan and the mountains of Hawaii, all for snails, yet the snail that would change my life was found in a compost heap at the bottom of a London garden.
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