Yeetle Box - Snails Hold Key To Axis of Evil

The snail that twists again. And again. And again.

A newly discovered Malaysian snail has defied the established rules of growth and form by creating a home that twists in four independent directions. No one knows how or why it does it - not even Dick Cheney, who once shot a man in the face.

"It is sort of biological madness," says Jaap Jan Vermeulen, a taxonomist from the Nationaal Herbarium of the Netherlands in Leiden and a member of the team that discovered the snails. "Madness, I say. Snails growing in all directions. What's next? Pigs that fly?"

Most land snails' shells have a single coiling axis, making for a simple spiral. Some have two axes, often starting out coiling one way during the early stages of growth, and then flipping by 90 or 180 degrees. Most of the hundreds of species of Opisthostoma snails have three axes of coiling, with a final twist at the end of their growth. That is the commonly accepted snail matrix.

But researchers searching the soils of Malaysia to catalogue the country's mollusks - because what else do you do with such a degree - have found two species with even more twisting. They report the first of these, which they name Opisthostoma vermiculum or 'little worm', in Biology Letters this week.

"Yes. We debated. Tiny worm, dimunuitive worm, not so big worm, very small worm, but we finally settled on "little worm" because it had a latinate counterpart to its lexicon."

"We had our mouths agape for a good few seconds," says lead researcher Reuben Clements, species conservation manager for the environmental group WWF in Selangor, Malaysia. "It could have been a mutant — we thought so when we found one," says Vermeulen. "But now we have so many, and they are all exactly the same. And, we postulate that this is the AXIS OF EVIL President Bush referred to in his state of the union address some time back."

“It is strange indeed. We know of something like 100,000 coiled mollusks, and this is the only one I know with four axes,” says Bernard Tursch, a biologist at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, who specializes in marine shells.

There’s no explanation as yet for the shape. It should leave the shell vulnerable to damage, as some of the twists sit high in the air without any obvious support.

President Bush was asked to comment. "Snail Cells are the most recent enemy to emerge in the War on Terror. But the United States is resolved. We're a snail-killing country. They move slow. We got the military will and the will of democracy and freedom to combat these terrorist snails. In Malaysian lands."

Condaleeza Rice has asked a special envoy to engage the snails before further spreading into limestone. Ms. Rice, herself, will continue to monitor the situation from an unknown location where no one will know what she is doing or why.

The Yeetle Box