The causes of behavioural handedness – Part 1: is it inherited?

Behavioural handedness is a part of everyday life that you probably don’t put much thought into. Roughly 90% of the population is right handed and prefer using their right hand for most manual tasks. As with most things handedness is not completely black and white and some prefer to use their non-dominant hand for some activities. Personally the only left thing about me is my political leaning. My left hand is useless and I favour my right for every task I can think of. As is common to right-handers, I also have a tendency to turn right upon entering a new environment. I share this behavioural bias with snail number 11714.

My masters project utilizes the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis as a model organism to study the causes of behavioural handedness. This is a different species of snail to the famous Jeremy, although the snails I’m using for the second…