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martyb writes:

Two lefties make a right—if you are a one-in-a-million garden snail:

In October 2016, evolutionary geneticist Dr. Angus Davison in the University of Nottingham's School of Life Sciences appealed to the public for their help in match-making for Jeremy, a garden snail with a rare left-coiling shell.

Dr. Davison hoped to use the offspring from Jeremy to study the genetics of this condition, because his previous work on snails had given insight into understanding body asymmetry in other animals, including humans. But another left-coiling snail had to be found first. As well as a mirror-imaged shell, Jeremy had genitals on the opposite side making it very difficult for the snail to mate with normal snails.

The science to unravel this mystery was made possible by the involvement of the general public in finding a mate for Jeremy, initially via an appeal put out on BBC Radio Four's Today program, and then the wider media using #snaillove.

[...] Altogether more than 40 lefty snails were found by citizen scientists, in the wild and from snail farms. Davison and the citizen scientists bred the lefty snails together to test whether their occurrence was due to an inherited condition. Over three years, nearly fifteen thousand eggs were hatched from four generations of snails, including Jeremy.

[...] The new evidence shows that rare lefty garden snails are not usually produced due to an inherited condition. Instead, they are mainly produced by a developmental accident.

[...] "We have learned that two lefties usually make a right, at least if you are a garden snail. In other snails, being a lefty is an inherited condition, but we still don't really know how they do it. If we are able to find out, then this may help us understand how the right and left side of other animal bodies are defined, including ourselves.

Journal Information:

DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2020.0110 Internet 'shellebrity' reflects on origin of rare mirror-image snails, Biology Letters, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2020.0110

Original Submission