Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (2 page)

There are certainly a lot of shells to choose from and this book won’t tell you everything there is to know about them. This is not a shell guide or a book on how to find and identify them, although I do hope it might convince some of you to go and take a closer look. This book is made up of
my choice of shell stories, ones that together paint a picture of a remarkable company of animals along with some of the more offbeat, forgotten and little-known tales of how those shells have made their way into the human world.

My own seashell story began as a little girl on beaches during family holidays to Cornwall, the tapering English county, an almost-island surrounded on all but one side by the Atlantic Ocean. With money inherited from my grandmother, we bought a damp, stone cottage in the village of North Hill, perched on the edge of Bodmin Moor. Every school holiday, including half terms, through summers and winters, we would bundle into the car and drive for four hours west. It often felt like a long way to go, and a long way from our cats and my friends. But looking back I have my parents to thank for making sure my sisters and I grew up, at least part of the time, immersed in this wild landscape.

Each day we had a choice of things to do and places to go. We could roam around the windswept, gorsey moor and scramble up to the granite peaks including Rough Tor, the highest point in Cornwall. Often we wandered down into the wooded valley that runs next to North Hill, to swing on ropes over the river, play Pooh-sticks or go searching for rabbits. And if we wanted to go to the beach we were spoilt for choice.

From our cottage it took roughly the same time to reach the craggy cliffs of the north coast and the gentler beaches of the south. My favourite was always Trebarwith Strand in the north, not far from Tintagel and its King Arthur memorabilia, which I wasn’t especially interested in. I was always much more excited by Trebarwith’s huge rocks that formed pools big enough to swim in at low tide, and by the dark caves, carved into the base of mountainous cliffs, where surely there was buried treasure to be found if I just kept looking for it. Not forgetting, of course, the long sandy
beach that stretched into the distance. There I built sandcastles and, sticking with convention, decorated them with seashells. Best of all, I liked finding shells that were worn away on the outside to reveal the spiral hidden underneath. They seemed to me the most exotic, magical secrets, things that I had assumed were just made up – like shimmering mirages on a hot road, or double rainbows – until I saw them for myself and had to readjust my view of the world. I had always wanted to know what lived inside these neat twists and wondered if their bodies went all the way through each loop to the middle.

Occasionally I’ve taken shells home with me, but I don’t remember ever gathering an organised or substantial collection. Instead, my shell-collecting has always been rather haphazard. Perhaps I enjoy the hunt more than the final prize. I only keep the ones I especially like the look of or that hold a special story I want to remember; I find them scattered here and there around my house, in a jewellery box or at the bottom of a pocket together with a fingernail of sand.

One year, when I was probably 13 or 14, I became fixated with painting watercolours of shells, mussel shells in particular, and I got good at rendering their fine blue and mauve lines. I remember my older sister having a large jar filled with yellow and orange periwinkles, which I always presumed she had collected herself. I loved to dip my hand into it and listen to the shells clanking around like marbles. Much later I learned that they had been Flat Periwinkles that live huddled among Bladderwrack and Knotted Wrack seaweeds, where they resemble the gas-filled bubbles that I loved to squeeze and pop.

The Cornish coasts and my childhood searches for spiralling seashells nurtured my curiosity in the wild, inscrutable seas, and almost without realising that I’d made a decision I knew I would become a marine biologist. The deal was sealed in my late teens when I began to explore Cornwall’s chilly Atlantic waters from a new perspective.
After going along to a free ‘try dive’ session at the local swimming pool at home, my friend Helena and I both signed up to a scuba-diving course (our instructors could never remember which of us had an ‘a’ at the end of our name). All the way through sixth form, we spent one evening each week clambering into dive kit, jumping into the deep end and learning to be fish.

Then, in the summer holidays, we would pile our gear into Helena’s ancient, sky-blue Ford Cavalier and drive down to the far west of Cornwall, sometimes breaking the journey overnight in North Hill to let the engine cool down. We camped in a field near Penzance, watched shooting stars by night and went diving every day. At first, the cold, greeny-grey waters and strong underwater currents were daunting and difficult, but it didn’t take long before I felt at home beneath the waves. We snooped around old, crepuscular shipwrecks that didn’t look much like ships any more, and spent hours meandering across rocky reefs encrusted with sealife. There I saw squadrons of crabs and starfish, crowds of ghostly Dead Man’s Fingers (a type of coral), colour-changing cuttlefish hanging in the water like miniature submarines with rippling skirts, gardens of flowerlike anemones in reds, oranges and pinks, and a solitary Cuckoo Wrasse with brilliant blue stripes would often follow us around, as if he wanted to know what we were up to; all things new to me. And always there were seashells. I saw for myself that they aren’t just beachside decorations but of course they are everywhere, scattered across the seabed – living and dead: scallops, cowries, cockles, clams, whelks. I filled my eyes and logbooks with as many of these encounters as I could, and became hopelessly addicted to the underwater world.

Following our trips to Cornwall, and clutching our dive certification cards, Helena and I both headed off to university. She studied languages and went into the wine trade, eventually moving to Australia and taking her dive kit with her. I studied ecology and marine biology and continued
with what’s become a lifelong love affair with scuba-diving. Besides exploring the seas wherever and whenever I could, I decided to try and do my bit to help protect the oceans and ocean life from the onslaughts of the modern world. I had seen for myself the deterioration of marine habitats and I began to notice how every creature matters, no matter how small and apparently insignificant. For many years I have lived and worked in countries around the world, investigating the problems of overfishing and working on strategies to protect the species and ecosystems in the greatest jeopardy. And all the while, throughout my research and travels, seashells have followed me around.

I have seen living shell-makers going about their lives, ambling across coral reefs or sitting still where they are and gently sifting seawater. I’ve marvelled at the bright colours of nudibranchs – seashells without shells – and often wondered why it is that I can’t stand slugs on land, but give them a lick of colour and drop them in the sea and they become quite adorable. On one occasion, strolling along a tropical beach, I foolishly picked up what I thought was an empty seashell and got pinched by the hermit crab inside – it wouldn’t let go, no matter how much I yelled at it. Now I’m a lot more wary of the animals that borrow shells.

I have also seen how people use shells and how they depend on them in many ways. In the hot, dry forests of giant baobabs in Madagascar, I found shells of African land snails (relatives of seashells) filled with rum and honey and left as offerings to the spirits of the forest. Many times I’ve walked through the miasma of a tropical fish market – in the Philippines, Thailand and Fiji – and seen piles of cockles, clams and other shellfish that offer a cheap source of protein for everyone. I have also witnessed the darker, elite side of shellfish. In remote fishing villages in Borneo, I saw the shrivelled meat from hundreds of illegally caught giant clams drying in the sun, destined for Asian markets where people pay top prices for these chewy delicacies.

At a fancy restaurant in Malaysia, I was offered a bowl of giant mangrove snails and had to politely decline, not because they were rare and threatened but because I couldn’t quite bring myself to wrestle them out of their shells and then swallow them down. But on other occasions I’ve enjoyed myself much more eating shellfish, perhaps most of all on England’s Norfolk coast, a few hours north from where I now live. Bags of fresh mussels are left on a table by the roadside in the village of Morston, where marshes with slurpy blue mud stretch out to the flat grey waters of the North Sea. We help ourselves and I lean in the window of the cottage, passing in a five-pound note. ‘My husband gathered them this morning,’ says the voice inside.

In my years of study and diving, I’ve also learned that there are masses of shelled animals living in the oceans that we could quite legitimately call seashells. On Cornish dives, I kept trying to bring back one of the empty, hollow sea urchin shells the size of grapefruits that I would often find lying on the sand, but every time it got broken on its journey to land. Crabs, lobsters and shrimp (including little cleaner shrimp on coral reefs and in tide pools that I’ve occasionally persuaded to give me a manicure) also have hardened, external shells. There are myriads of intricate sea creatures that spend their lives drifting with the currents. Most can only be seen with the aid of a microscope and they are known, generally, as plankton: foraminifera and coccolithophores sculpt chalky shells, some looking like snowflakes, others like bits of popcorn stuck together; diatoms and radiolarians make their shells from silicon and look like miniature glass Christmas tree ornaments, triangles, diamonds and stars. All of these living things have their own stories to tell and important roles in life on Earth, but this book is about just one particular group that, to my mind, are the greatest shell-makers of them all. These are the animals that go by the name of Mollusca – the molluscs.

CHAPTER ONE

Meet the Shell-makers

N
o matter where you are in the world, you will never be far from a mollusc. These are some of the most abundant, most cosmopolitan animals on the planet, not to mention their being among the toughest, smartest and strangest creatures ever to evolve. They include familiar creatures like snails and mussels, clams and squid, as well as lesser-known varieties like chitons and nautiluses and argonauts. Molluscs (known in America as mollusks) are the animals that make seashells although, admittedly, not all of them do. Shell-free varieties exist, including octopuses and slugs as well as animals you’d be forgiven for thinking were shiny little worms. But the great majority of molluscs produce a shell of some kind. To tell tales of seashells we need to begin here, with the story of the molluscs.

No one knows exactly how many molluscs there are in total. Often-quoted numbers range from 50,000 to 100,000 known, named living species. The reason we don’t know for sure is because there hasn’t been a single mollusc catalogue. To name a new species, all you need do is publish a peer-reviewed paper describing it, showing why you believe it is new and hasn’t previously been named, then deposit a specimen – the type – somewhere that other people can go and look at it, usually a museum. You don’t have to inform some grand master of molluscs that you’ve found a new one, but simply add your piece of knowledge to the sprawling mountains of academic literature. And with many tens of thousands of species – including a number that have accidentally been named more than once – it’s no wonder things have got rather out of hand. That’s now changing, with the launch in 2014 of
MolluscaBase
, an online repository for mollusc species. It’s a gargantuan effort led by teams of malacologists – the people who study molluscs – and together they are painstakingly sifting through the literature to compile a definitive mollusc list. Every year more species will be added as other malacologists venture out and delve ever deeper into the world of molluscs. Because the truth is, if you want to find new molluscs, all you really have to do is go and look for them.

Back in 1993, a group of marine biologists arrived on the Pacific island of New Caledonia with one thing on their minds. They planned to find as many molluscs as possible in one month. Led by
Philippe Bouchet
, from the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris, the team of scuba-divers spent a total of 400 person-hours rummaging through the deepest recesses of coral reefs in a lagoon on the island’s north-west coast. They hand-picked specimens, brushed stones, cracked open solid chunks of dead coral, and even used a waterproof vacuum cleaner to carefully slurp up the tiniest hidden gems.