Ask Fuzzy: Is a bluebottle left or right handed?

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This might seem an odd question given bluebottles don't have hands, but yes, it does make sense. In this case, handedness refers to the gas-filled bladder that sticks up like a sail.

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Bluebottles exist in a colony and cannot survive alone. Picture Shutterstock

In about half of bluebottles, the bladder is angled to the left and in the other half it's angled to the right.

This affects how they travel with the wind. Or, if you have a nautical bent, you'd say half tack to starboard and half tack to port.

The reason appears to be that as they travel in an "armada" (another nautical term), about half will sail towards the shore, while the others sail away. That makes it a kind of risk-sharing insurance policy that helps keep the animals alive.

Bluebottles belong to a particularly weird group called siphonophores and it's debatable whether they are even a single creature.

Rather, they are made up of a colony where each member is called a "person" (technically speaking, they are genetically identical zooids).

Each has a function such as hunting, swimming, feeding or reproduction. As part of a colony, they share resources and cannot survive alone.

If bluebottles as a population are not predominantly left or right handed (warning: Dad joke...) would we say they are even handed?

There are, however, plenty of examples where this isn't the case, such as humans who are predominantly right-handed.

Meanwhile, kangaroos and wallabies tend to be left handed, which is unexpected because marsupials don't have the connecting nerve bundle that joins the two sides of the brain, called the corpus callosum.

That terrestrial snails almost always coil to the right should not be surprising because those that coil left will have an unsatisfying sex life unless they meet another member of the minority.

Handedness even extends into the molecular scale and the misfolded proteins called "prions". Like snail shells, these can coil left or right - scientists call this "chirality".

Prions are corrupted proteins that are implicated in neurodegenerative conditions such as mad cow disease. Prions form a growing chain-link that grows outwards in all directions, doubling in size about every two days. Eventually this effectively renders the brain cells inert and the disease becomes fatal.

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