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.

Beauty as danger and as saviour

On Monday morning (4 August), I was making coffee and listening to the Radio 4 Today programme when Angus’s research into the genetics of these snails was mentioned. Later on I found an article about them on the BBC website (and there was more coverage). I am not sure whether the Polymita snails will go viral like Jeremy, but they are certainly fascinating.

As in the case of Jeremy, the focus of Angus’s research is evolutionary genetics and conservation: “The team aims to use this [genetic] information to confirm how many species there are, how they are related to each other and what part of their genetic code gives them their extraordinary, unique colour patterns” – their beauty.

And here is the rub. Their beauty is their Achilles heel. Because they are so beautiful, they are collected and sold to tourists as jewellery and other trinkets. That, together with climate change and habitat loss might hasten their extinction.

The beauty of these snails is generally recognised and celebrated. The Polymita snail has been called the ‘world’s most beautiful snail. This might have been one of the reasons why, in 2022, it was crowned mollusc of the year, a competition started in 2020 to raise awareness of molluscs, a diverse group of invertebrates including snails, slugs, clams, and octopuses. The money awarded was used to sequence the entire genome of the Cuban land snail.

This all made me think a bit more about whether it’s possible to celebrate these magnificent creatures through science and art rather than exploitation.

Snails, beauty and art

I wondered whether such ‘painted’ snails made it into art. From what I can see, there are some links between this type of snail and art, but not a lot. As one article pointed out, “The interdisciplinarity between malacology [the branch of zoology focused on the study of molluscs] and visual arts is only moderately developed (e.g., Kuechen, 1979*), and then mainly from the viewpoint of art history”… .

As I expected, snails have found their way into pictures and paintings of still-lives for example, from the 16th century onwards. They became more prominent in Dutch art in the 17th century because of colonial and post-colonial trade. This is well-documented in an article entitled “From a ‘domestic commodity’ to a ‘secret of trade’: snails and shells of land molluscs in early (mainly 16th and 17th century) visual arts.” The article contains, for example, a ‘still-life with silver and plated ware, porcelain, shells and other valuables’ by David Rijckaert (II) in Antwerp and dated 1616!

After that, art history seems to be quiet on the topic. But I found a few depictions of painted snails on Instagram, Pinterest and so on, mainly photographs, some paintings, some graphic art. Amongst the paintings, I found an oil painting entitled “Polymita Blue” by a surrealist artist which represents not a mermaid but what one might call a snailmaid. And amongst the photographs I even found a left-handed Polymita snail –  like Jeremy!!

Snails, beauty and science

At the end of his book On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin talks about “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful”.

The painted snails are certainly amongst those, and they still hide scientific mysteries behind their beauty that evolutionary biologists aim to solve. I quote from a 2017 exhibition of these snails at the American Museum of Natural History: “’Over a century ago, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace argued about the purpose of zebras’ stripes,’ says Mark Siddall, curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology. ‘We still don’t know the answer, save that it’s definitely not about camouflage—that was proven just this year. Obviously, we’re a lot further away from understanding the stripes on land snails.’”

An article has just come out, co-authored by one of Angus’s collaborators, Bernardo Reyes-Tur, which might lift the veil a little bit on that mystery. One finding is especially interesting: “Based on our findings, yellowish morphs will be more resistant to future climatic conditions in their respective habitats on the island.” But there is more to do, I am sure!

One thing is sure: To celebrate these magnificent creatures through science and art rather than exploitation, we need to follow this advice given alongside a glittering painting of a Cuban land snail on Instagram, namely “Buy the art, not the jewelry”!

Postscript

The good news is that, according to Angus, the media coverage of the mission to save the snails is already showing some success, as “illegally traded shells have now disappeared from Etsy” (I had still seen them there when I started to write this post on Monday!)

FOOTNOTE

* Kuechen, U.-B., 1979. Wechselbeziehungen zwischen allegorischer Naturdeutung und der naturkundlichen Kenntnis von Muschel, Schnecke und Nautilus. Ein Beitrag aus literarischer, naturwissenschaftlicher und kunsthistorischer Sicht. In: Haug, W. (ed.), Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie: 478-514. J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart.

Image: Wikimedia Commons