Left Handed Snails Have Advantage

Written by Kelly Epperson

I recently uncovered a folder in my computer with "story ideas" dating back several years. If a headline grabbed me, I'd put it here for future column fodder. Obviously I never run out of ideas to write about because I forgot I had this stuff. The links are all inactive now, but the titles indicate what sparked my interest.

February 2006: Valentine's Day Research Key for Hallmark. (Eternal fun with this one.) "Sweet" cemetery, home to Keats, Shelley, crumbling in Rome. (Maybe I thought I could visit this cemetery for poets while I was traipsing around Europe.) Britons Dedicate Renovated Franklin Home. (Not many Americans know that Ben Franklin lived across the pond for a while.)

December 2005: Iran's President Bans Western Music. (Not sure if I would go silly or serious with this one.) March 2006: US writer Norman Mailer wins top France prize. (Living in France then, was preoccupied with writers and France.) May 2006: Bob Geldof Given Moral Courage Award. (I was at the first Live Aid concert in London in 1985 and will always have respect and admiration for Bob Geldof.)

There is one item in the bunch that I may have written a column on: Left Handed Snails Have Advantage.

That headline still cracks me up. I researched to find the original posting, an article in USA Today from March 2006. Research had found evidence that snails whose shells coil toward the left have a better advantage at fending off crabs.

Crabs are apparently right-handed. Or is that right-clawed?

"The researchers studied about 1,800 snail fossils, looking for scarring evidence of a predator attack. Scarring was found more frequently on right-handed snails, the study said."

It did not say how many of the 1,800 were righties as opposed to lefties. "These snails that are left-handed, they have an advantage. It doesn't become an advantage if lefties are just as common as righties."

So obviously, there were more righties, and so obviously, to me anyway, would it not make sense statistically that more righties would be attacked simply because there were more of them?

I will not debate the study. I will simply relate my amusement in 2006, and six years later, the headline still makes me smile. The study was posted in the "Royal Society Biology Letters" so it probably was not a US study.

We have plenty of funny studies here in the states. I have always wondered who thinks up the studies, who funds them, and how does one get to be a participant.

I'm not a snail so that excludes me from that one, but I heard a study report that we look at our refrigerator 37 times a day. I use this stat often in my happiness presentations, and daily I think I will verify its accuracy. Daily I forget after two times to the fridge.

I would love to be in a control group that eats ice cream every day and watches funny movies versus those who eat ice cream every day and watch the news. I bet we can predict what group would report a higher level of happiness. (Weight gain is not part of this study.)

Think up a study and let me be a part. I am female, right handed, and I have never attacked a snail.