Snail seeks rare mate in unlikely love quest

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.

- THE WASHINGTON POST

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 oki-ly-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.