New Zealand illustrator Giselle Clarkson found a snail with a rare left-spiraling shell in her garden and named it Ned. She helped launch a national campaign to find Ned a mate. Photo / Giselle Clarkson
Ned is left-spiralling thanks to a rare shell. An illustrator who found the snail has inspired hunts across New Zealand for a suitable mate.
In a world that swipes right for love, one lonely snail in New Zealand is looking for a match that can swipe left – and Kiwis across the country are now searching for love in the dampest of places, thanks to a magazine’s campaign.
Meet Ned, the eligible bachelor. Ned likes leafy greens, moist environments and hanging upside down on plants. And while everyone on the apps will insist they’re one in a million, Ned truly is a rarity among gastropods.
Ned has a left-spiralling shell, meaning that the distinctive, hard-coated whorl faces to the left rather than to the right, as is the case for most snails. Only about 1 in 40,000 snails have left-coiling shells, so when Giselle Clarkson came across Ned relaxing on a bit of bok choy in her garden last week in Wairarapa, on New Zealand’s North Island, she thought at first she had stumbled upon a new species. “When you see something thousands and thousands of times and suddenly it looks different, it’s quite uncanny,” Clarkson said in an interview.
Clarkson usually leaves the snails in her garden for the birds, but after realising what she had found, she decided to name the slithery fellow “Ned” after Ned Flanders, the okily-dokily, left-handed neighbour from The Simpsons. She made a home for the snail out of a fishbowl, adorned with some broccoli and silver beet seedlings from her garden, as well as a mossy rock and some tree bark.
Ned’s rare shell may have kept the birds at bay, but it also means Ned will probably be forced into a life of celibacy. While snails are hermaphrodites – they have both male and female genitalia and reproductive organs, with both partners exchanging sperm during the slimy affair – the spiralling of the shell for lefty snails means that their bedroom bits are reversed and unable to match up with those of a righty partner.
Scientist Angus Davison, who studies snails at the University of Nottingham in England, likened the situation to buses approaching from opposite directions. The driver of a London double-decker can pause and chat through the window to another driver as they pass each other, but that wouldn’t work with the driver of a bus from New York, whose wheel is on the other side.
Should Ned hope to mate one day, it will have to be with another very rare left-coiled snail.
Thus began the national campaign to find Ned a mate. Clarkson, an illustrator and author who has done work for New Zealand Geographic, teamed up with her colleagues at the magazine to mobilise the curious to comb through their gardens and yards for potential lefty lovers for Ned.
“The chance of finding a mate for Ned is 1 in 40,000, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile,” James Frankham, publisher of New Zealand Geographic, said in an email.
Their campaign is not the first attempt at snail matchmaking.
In 2016, Davison launched a similar effort in Britain after a retired scientist discovered a left-coiled snail in a compost heap in London. Davison, who studies the genetics of the snails, named the unfortunate gastropod Jeremy after Jeremy Corbyn, then the left-wing leader of the country’s Labour Party, and put out an international call for more lefties.
“People can empathise with what they view to be a lonely snail that can’t find a mate,” Davison said in an interview. “But for me as a scientist, the more interesting thing is trying to understand the left and the right side of the body and how that applies to ourselves.”
The campaign resulted in two potential suitors for Jeremy - one named Lefty that was found by a snail enthusiast in Ipswich, on the eastern coast of England, and another named Tomeu, found by a restaurateur in Mallorca, Spain, who was raising snails for culinary purposes. In a telenovela twist, Lefty and Tomeu ended up jilting Jeremy and mating with each other instead.
The lesson to take from Jeremy is that “it’s tough out there,” Clarkson said. “Just because you’re physically compatible, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to hit it off,” she said. “The sparks aren’t necessarily going to fly.”
But Jeremy eventually joined the Lefty-Tomeu coupling, forming a throuple and fathering an estimated dozen or so babies with Tomeu before dying in 2017, Davison said. And for Clarkson and the team at New Zealand Geographic, the campaign to find Ned a mate goes beyond matchmaking.
“New Zealand Geographic exists to find connections between Kiwis and their environment,” Frankham said. “Recently, many of those connections have been strained, and the solutions seem remote. But Ned has got readers rummaging around their garden at night under torchlight, looking for life in the dark, wet, forgotten corners of their homes.”
Snails too often get overlooked as just pests, Clarkson said, and the search for Ned’s mate helps push “observology,” a concept she put into a children’s book titled The Observologist a few years ago.
“The entire idea is that there are just amazing things to see in your backyard, at the park or on your walk to school,” she said. “We take it for granted, these flies and bees and slugs. We overlook them because they’re common. But they’re fascinating.”
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