Ned is a perfectly nice snail. If he had a dating profile, it might read: good listener, stable home, likes broccoli, seeks love.
But he’s already exhausted his local options and it’s not because he’s picky or unappealing. Instead, he’s a common garden snail with an uncommon anatomical problem that’s ruining his love life.
Ned’s shell coils to the left, not the right, making him the 1 in 40,000 snails whose sex organs don’t line up with those of the rest of their species. Unless another lefty snail is found, the young gastropod faces a lifetime of unintentional celibacy.
That dire prospect prompted a New Zealand nature lover who found the snail in her garden in August to launch a campaign to find his perfect match. But Ned’s quest for true love, perhaps predictably, is slow.
Giselle Clarkson was weeding her home vegetable patch in Wairarapa on the North Island when a snail tumbling out of the leafy greens caught her eye. Clarkson, the author and illustrator of a nature book, “The Observologist,” has an affection for snails and had long been on the lookout for a sinistral, or left-coiled shell.
“I knew immediately that I couldn’t just toss the snail back into the weeds with the others,” she said. Instead, she sent a photo of the snail, pictured alongside a right-coiled gastropod as proof, to her colleagues at New Zealand Geographic.
The magazine launched a nationwide campaign to find a mate for Ned, named for the left-handed character Ned Flanders in “The Simpsons,” who once opened a store called The Leftorium. That explains the male pronouns some use for Ned, although snails are hermaphrodites with sex organs on their necks and the capacity for both eggs and sperm.
“When you have a right-coiling snail and a left-coiling snail, they can’t slide up and get their pieces meeting in the right position,” Clarkson said. “So a lefty can only mate with another lefty.”
