Left turn saves snails from snakes

Evolutionary advantage often makes for show-stopping stuff — a cheetah’s speed, for example, or a moth’s almost perfect mimicry of tree bark. In some snails, however, it’s simply down to a poor fit with a snake’s jaw.

Some species of Satsuma snail have shells that coil to the left, which probably evolved because the snakes that prey on them have jaws specialized for feeding on the molluscs’ right-coiling ancestors, a study published today in Nature Communications suggests.

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