Researchers in Japan have altered the destiny of a rout of snails by changing the chirality of their shells before birth. By delicately manipulating a batch of developing embryos, the scientists ...

Symmetry is a feature of many plants, animals and even some molecules — like water. But that’s not the case with snails and their coiled shells. They are chiral — asymmetrical in such a way that they ...

A genetic spin doctor sets snail shells to swirl clockwise, new research confirms. And the twist in this story comes at the beginning — when snail embryos are just single cells. Working at the Tokyo ...

A snail with a shell spiraling to the right can’t mate readily with a lefty. So, changes in the single gene that controls shell direction have created new snail species, say researchers. Among the 20 ...

Snails can be objects of fascination for kids playing outside. Lucky for the snails, they have their hard shells to protect them from children and predators alike. But are they born with that natural ...

Snails have shells the moment they're born, but it's kind of hard to tell. In fact, it's hard to even see a baby snail. Some are nearly microscopic, such as Angustopila psammion, whose adult-sized ...

At just three millimeters long, the newest addition to science’s catalog of life is easy to miss. But when a team of malacologists stumbled upon the minute snail in a Thai national park, they noticed ...

Two shells lie on the beach, next to a clump of seaweed. Both shells are spirals. The shell on the left is the empty outer shell of an auger snail, which grew around and with its spiral-shaped body.

Two potential mates have been lined up for a lonely snail after a scientist appealed to the public to help find a partner for the mollusc whose shell spirals in the wrong direction. The common garden ...