Ned's Dead
Sometime on the night of Wednesday, April 15, Ned the left-spiralling snail slid off this mortal coil. “He was inside his pāua-shell abode when he passed,” says illustrator Giselle Clarkson, who had been Ned’s gentle keeper since finding him in her Wairarapa garden in August 2025. “That’s where he slept every day.” Ned had a pampered life with Clarkson, cruising a terrarium in her lounge with two right-spiralling snail buddies, plus an assortment of slaters, beetles and a spider. Clarkson spritzed them with water every day, and brought greens from her garden. Shortly before he died, she says, Ned had eaten some cucumber, some carrot, and some French beans. “Boy, he loved his French beans.” Here’s the thing about Ned: his shell coiled left, putting him at odds with almost every other snail on the planet. He was a sinistral, entirely flipped, a one-in-40,000 find. The arrangement of his organs* meant mating was going to be all but impossible without another leftie. New Zealand Geographic asked readers to help us find such a mate. Then the BBC called, and everyone else: CNN, AP News, the Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, the Irish Examiner, the Guardian, Der Spiegel. Ned even made an international Nature newsletter. Clarkson gave so many interviews that her second thought, the moment she found Ned dead, was, “Oh my god, please tell me I don’t have to talk to the BBC about this.” Her first? “It was a bit sooner than I expected. I just thought I had longer.” While he leaves no progeny, Clarkson hopes that Ned’s short life may have lit a lasting spark: “I just want people to look, and notice, and be gentle and inquisitive with what’s around them.” On the day of Ned’s death, out of respect, she did not chuck any snails she found in her veggie garden to the chooks. She has freed his friends. “They had it good for a long time, for a couple of righties.” And Ned? His earthly remains are still in the terrarium, closely attended by the slaters, centipedes and springtails. Clarkson hopes they will eat his flesh, leaving her a shell to take pride of place in her collection of curios. “I’ll keep Ned in my cabinet, and in my heart, forever.” Ned’s cause of death is unconfirmed, and Clarkson begs for privacy at this time. *All snails are in fact hermaphrodites, meaning we should technically be calling Ned “it”. But that would be weird.
