The tragic love life of Jeremy, the world’s loneliest snail
In 2016, a retired scientist in London discovered a garden snail with a shell that coiled counterclockwise — the opposite of nearly every other snail on Earth. He named the snail Jeremy, after Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (also a lefty), and what followed was an international quest to find the lonely gastropod a mate.
The problem: snails with left-coiling shells can’t physically mate with right-coiling snails. Their reproductive organs are on opposite sides. It’s like trying to shake hands with someone whose arm is attached to the wrong shoulder. Scientists at the University of Nottingham launched a public appeal, asking people worldwide to search their gardens for other “sinistral” snails.
Two potential mates were eventually found — Lefty from Ipswich and Tomeu from Majorca. But when they arrived, they promptly mated with each other instead of Jeremy, leaving our hero to watch from the sidelines. Jeremy did eventually mate with Tomeu, but died shortly after in 2017 without seeing his offspring. The babies all had normal right-coiling shells, since the trait is recessive.
The whole saga became a genetics lesson wrapped in a love story. Researchers discovered that snail shell orientation is determined during the first cell division after fertilization — a finding with implications for understanding asymmetry in other organisms, including humans. Jeremy may have died unlucky in love, but he advanced science.