From a little garden in New Zealand, comes a lonely snail looking for love.

Ned is ying to another mollusc’s yang, but finding a match for him has become a nationwide effort.

That is because Ned’s shell spirals left, while almost all other snails have right spiraling shells. It’s a one in 40,000 genetic condition among the common corno espersum, or garden snail, and it means Ned’s reproductive organs don’t line up with most others.

“I was quite breathless for a moment,” says Giselle Clarkson, an author, illustrator and self-described ‘observologist’ who found Ned while digging in her garden in Wairarapa, just north of capital Wellington.

“I was just pulling out this plant, and a snail tumbled into the dirt and I was just about to scoop it up and just chuck it off to the side, when I re

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