Helen Scales

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228 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Helen Scales’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Seashells · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

And the rest of the body is also asymmetrical.

And crucially, the sexual organs are also offset.

And certainly garden snails reproduce face to face.

And so I like to think of it, the analogy I give is if you try to shake someone's hand and you both put out the same hand on the same side, it doesn't tend to work.

You've got to match.

So poor old Jeremy needed a mate who was also a left spinning garden snail.

And a campaign went out, this is about 10 years ago now.

He went out on the Today programme.

The call went out for other left-spinning garden snails.

And they found quite a few.

And they were sent to the University of Nottingham where research was being done on Jeremy.

There were some offspring.

And actually, this research has carried on.

And the people who've been looking into this are continuing to explore this idea of this left spiralling rarity.

And they have discovered, they think that it seems to really be an accident early on in the development of the shell, that something happens in the first few divisions of the embryo of the mollusk when it's really tiny, that kind of sets it off in the other direction.

And then once you get going, they keep going that way.

As far as I know, this is one of the big puzzles of mollusks, that we don't really have a very good explanation for some of the patterns.

For instance, again, I have a cone shell with me, and the patterns on this one are lots of repeated triangles, a sort of dog-tooth pattern.

You can have a look at it if you like.

It's good and dead, don't worry.

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