Beauty and the snail

August 8, 2025, by Brigitte Nerlich

Beauty and the snail

Since around 2016, the year I retired, I have followed the blossoming career of another University of Nottingham academic, Angus Davison, a professor of evolutionary genetics and expert on snails and a science communicator. He became famous in 2016 when he began to write and broadcast about ‘ Jeremy the lonely lefty snail ’, a snail with a left-spiralling shell, that died in 2017, leaving behind a musical ballad as well offspring for further genetic analysis.

Jeremy was a snail that went viral and with it work on the genetic underpinnings of body asymmetry. Science fact and science fascination came together in the right political context to spark some great science communication.

Now, nearly ten years later, Angus’s fascination with snails has not diminished and he is now working on a different species, not plain old brown garden snails (ok, I don’t want to diss them, some are really pretty), but on the spectacular Cuban Polymita land snails or ‘painted’ snails which come in the most fantastic stripes and colours.

If you want to continue reading this post, please go to my new blogging site here: https: //makingsciencepublic. com/2025/08/08/beauty-and-the-snail/