Talk:Jeremy (snail)

Hooks

... that Jeremy the left-coiled snail died this month after fathering 56 right-coiled offspring? (Source https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/science/jeremy-lefty-snail.html)

... that ...that research on the genes of Jeremy the rare left-coiled snail could help scientists understand diseases like Situs inversus? (Source https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/science/jeremy-lefty-snail.html)

Dysklyver 22:40, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

DYK

This is the most ridiculous article I've seen on Wikipedia, and it's featured on the homepage.

+1, its great isn't it. Though there is a serious science based undertone to the article involving genetic research if you look closely. Dysklyver 15:08, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

+1 It sounded silly, and the hook is, but the article is serious and Today I Learned Something. Daniel Case (talk) 19:33, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

+1, I am so glad I found this while looking for cute snail pictures.Fivework (talk) 04:22, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

Photo?

This article needs a photo of its subject! --Piledhigheranddeeper (talk) 02:00, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

None are available with a usable license, and being a very rare mutation, we cant just use a picture of any snail. Dysklyver 15:06, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Recessive gene

Looking at this paragraph:

It is believed that the genetic mutation might reappear in a later generation due to a recessive gene.[15][16] In snails, a shell-coiling trait may reappear later in another generation, even if a previous generation appears normal, because the gene which causes the mutation is hereditary.[17][18]

The first sentence says that it is a recessive gene. If the reader clicks on the link to the recessive gene article it explains how the phenotype could reappear in a later generation. The second sentence doesn't make much sense to me - to say the gene is hereditary is surely redundant, as all genes are hereditary.

Yes, the last sentence is doubly senseless because not only are all genes hereditary anyway, but also no gene is causing a mutation. I could read page 707 of reference [18] and I mean the best explanation is the sentence I cited. 194.174.73.80 (talk) 14:33, 27 October 2017 (UTC) Marco Pagliero Berlin

The whole point of that section (as I wrote it), is that the gene is supposed to be both hereditary and recessive, like in humans suffering from organ inversion, and the study of these genes and the extent to which they are hereditary is why the research is important. Particularly when looking at diseases, genes are often needlessly referred to as hereditary as a matter of style. I think to say all genes are hereditary is probably an oversimplification, but essentially correct. As the entire point of the paragraph is to explain that this is an area of research, I think it should be noted that it is important to state the hereditary nature of said gene. Dysklyver 15:05, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Fine fine fine, so you reverted my edit. As you please, but still your version is meaningless poor English because the point with the snail is not that the gene involved to be hereditary, second no gene causes a mutation and third your sentence misses completely the point of the F3 generation showing a phenotype which was masked in F2.

By now I have some doubts about your competence in biology or maybe you have just difficulties with verbal expression as your very special usage of "gene", "mutation" and "hereditary" suggests (maybe are you confusing "hereditary" and "homozygous"?) but I'm not going to war with you about it. Here my phrasing you just reverted: "In snails, a shell-coiling trait may reappear later in another generation, even if a previous generation appears normal, because the coiling phenotype of an individual snail is determined by the genotype of its mother" and let the others choose 194.174.73.80 (talk) 15:58, 27 October 2017 (UTC) Marco Pagliero Berlin

PS: Here a good explanation of the matter: http://www.biologydiscussion.com/genetics/cytoplasmic-inheritance/inheritance-of-shell-coiling-in-snail-with-diagram/37190 and here my summary: the children's coiling depends only on the genotype of the mother and not on theirs own because the coiling in the embryo is determined by the orientation of the spindle at the time of the first divisions of the egg. So all children of an homozygously left-coiled mother will be left-coiled but she can still be right-coiled if her mother was not homozygously left-coiled.

All this has possibly nothing to do with your pet topic "genetic malformations" (and by the way: where in the sources did you find "situs inversus" to be a disease?

Yeah but I am just quoting sources, and you are overcomplicating things and doing original research. There is no way adding words like "homozygous", "phenotype" and "F3 generation" is going to help explain anything to our readers at all. My honest opinion would be to add another paragraph or two of background science information directly after this, this article could do with the extra length anyway. Just don't try to alter what has been written already, it accurately depicts what has been explained in the sources and you risk losing connection with the topic. I will leave it up to you what background is relevant.

Now I will quote from the New York Times [1], who said (my bolding, their link):

"All of the babies were born with a right-handed shell. This means the gene causing a snail’s directional twist (and body asymmetry in other animals), described last year in Current Biology, could take more than a generation for its recessive form to appear. Once it does, Dr. Davison hopes genetic studies will reveal why the snails are so rare — and what sort of genetic switches may drive their bodies to turn one way instead of the other. The knowledge he gains studying the slimy shell-dwellers will also provide insight about body asymmetries that develop in other animals, including humans. About one in 10,000 people (like Catherine O’Hara, Enrique Iglesias and Donny Osmond) have situs inversus, a rare disease, that flips their internal organ arrangement like an image in a mirror.

> Dysklyver 20:26, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Semantics upside-down: My phrasing, which you reverted: "because the coiling phenotype of an individual snail is determined by the genotype of its mother" is a literal quotation from your source, while your sentence "because the gene which causes the mutation is hereditary" is not only meaningless, but must be your own invention, i.e. original research. You probably meant ".. is recessive".
By the way, your quotation from the NYT suggests
- that you are possibly confusing "hereditary" with "recessive"
- that it is not true, that "what has been written already [..] accurately depicts what has been explained in the sources". Excuse me, but you seem to have a serious problem with verbal expression, the sentence you so bitterly defend doesn't come even close to "accurately depict" the meaning of what you have bolded in your citation: "the gene causing a snail’s directional twist" doesn't mean "the gene which causes the mutation" and "could take more than a generation for its recessive form to appear" doesn't mean "is hereditary".
And despite the NYT, "situs inversus" per se is nowhere else classified as a disease (but "situs ambiguous", a different condition). 194.174.76.21 (talk) 20:01, 16 November 2017 (UTC) Marco Pagliero Berlin

Right, I get that, I am not necessarily disagreeing with you, so rather than repeating what you have already written, could you please find a source to back it up that is relevant to this snail? Otherwise as I mentioned above, a background explanation of the science could be added as a new paragraph. The NYT does not use any of the words you want to add, and the mutation is the snails directional twist (or at last it says so in some of the other sources). My use of the term 'hereditary' comes from the oxford dictionary, and is used in its ordinary meaning as (of a characteristic or disease) determined by genetic factors and therefore able to be passed on from parents to their offspring or descendants. which is correct, not as a synonym of recessive, I can't just quote the sources exactly all the time, this had to pass a DYK level COPYVIO check. And it is clearly not my fault if the NYT is wrong, but you would need to find a better source (maybe a medical journal?) saying that situs inversus is not a disease. Dysklyver 20:34, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

heredity or environment

Is it known with certainty whether left coiling in garden snails is due to heredity or environment? Proxima Centauri (talk) 15:35, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

I don't think its known with certainty but all the sources I have read say it is heredity, even explaining how it reoccurs in future generations, with some detail, and there seems to be funding for people to isolate the specific gene. No reliable sources I have read indicate this specific snail is left coiled due to environment, although that is not to say it's been proven one way or the other, in other animals and other species of snail the environment has been shown to be a factor. It could be relevant. Dysklyver 16:20, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. Proxima Centauri (talk) 16:43, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

"normal"

The article as it was made a lot of references to right-coiled shelled snails (dextral snails?) being "normal". I have removed such references, and left the more objective descriptions of the direction in which the shells coil. In places where there weren't already such descriptions, I added them in.

There is no scientific, objective meaning to the word "normal" that does not imply some variance. In strict terms, "normal" qualifies a statistical distribution, and never any specific individual. If we really, specifically want to refer to the most frequent occurrence in a sample, or in a population, then "modal" is the correct adjective, and it does not come with value judgement connotations. It may not matter very much for snails, but just in general, I feel there needs to be pushback against a concept of normalcy that does not include diversity.

Unless this is actually very precisely defined, technical terminology in this field (which I very much doubt), I hope people will agree that this change is for the best. Being different from the majority of snails, Jeremy was as normal as they come. Elise.davignon (talk) 15:24, 11 October 2023 (UTC)