Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells Read online

  SPIRALS IN TIME

  Also available in the Bloomsbury Sigma series:

  Sex on Earth by Jules Howard

  p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong

  Atoms under the Floorboards by Chris Woodford

  SPIRALS IN TIME

  The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells

  Helen Scales

  For Katie and Ruth

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Meet the Shell-makers

  Chapter 2: How to Build a Shell

  Chapter 3: Sex, Death and Gems

  Chapter 4: Shell Food

  Chapter 5: A Mollusc Called Home

  Chapter 6: Spinning Shell Stories

  Chapter 7: Flight of the Argonauts

  Chapter 8: Hunting for Treasures

  Chapter 9: Bright Ideas

  Chapter 10: The Sea Butterfly Effect

  Epilogue

  A Note on Shell-collecting

  Glossary: A Word in your Shell-like

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Prologue

  Never go anywhere without your seashell. At least that was the rule that Triton lived by. He was a merman – top half human, bottom half fish – and a demigod in Greek mythology, not a fully fledged deity. Nevertheless, he did his best to dash around playing his trumpet, which was fashioned from a large shell with the end cut off; he used the trumpet’s ear-splitting roar to scare off raging giants and command the seas. Triton was often outshone by his famous parents Poseidon and Amphitrite, the god and goddess of the sea, not to mention his extended family. Poseidon fathered a prodigious and eclectic assortment of offspring: there was a man-eating cyclops, a sea monster that stirred up island-swallowing whirlpools, a talking stallion, and a sea-nymph who could control violent waves and married a giant with a thousand hands and fifty heads.

  Then there was Triton with his shell. His special power was perhaps not as flashy as those of some of his siblings and in-laws, but he was still someone not to mess with. One story tells of Misenus, a mortal from the city of Troy, who thought himself a gifted trumpeter and rashly challenged Triton to a musical contest. Outraged by all the boasting, the demigod shoved Misenus in the sea and drowned him. It seems Triton was a bit sensitive about his seashell trumpet.

  Beyond myths and stories, seashells have always been highly valued and revered in the real, human world. Since prehistoric times, we have found shells, picked them up and looked at them in wonder. People have contemplated the seashells’ beautiful shapes and the mysterious ocean realm they come from, and turned them into great treasures. For centuries, the wail of conch trumpets has echoed across the peaks of the Himalayas, calling Tibetan Buddhist monks to prayer. The conch shells inhabit the Indian Ocean and have been carried hundreds of miles inland, high into the mountains, where they are carved with intricate designs, decorated with jewels and precious metals and adorned with colourful ribbons. Standing on the rooftops of monasteries, monks play shell music into the skies to ward off approaching storms and drive away evil spirits.

  Sadly, though, in more recent times, people have begun to lose this sense of awe in seashells. Their magnificence is fading and being replaced instead by inelegant clutter. I brooded on this while hunting around the internet for the words ‘seashell’ and ‘figurine’. A cavalcade of aquatic kitsch unfolded across my screen, and one image in particular stuck in my mind: a little seashell man. His body was a large cowrie shell, his head a slightly smaller one – the opening gave him a goofy, crinkled smile – and glued on top was a cockleshell hat. His arms and legs were made from four twisted turret shells that poked out at odd angles, and he sat on an elephant made from a dead starfish with one leg raised as a trunk and clam shells for ears (not to worry, though – I’m sure it’s what the starfish would have wanted). Another spectacle of shellcraft dreck – available to buy at optimistically high prices – was a series of ceramic human heads covered in dreadful jumbles of seashells along with strings of pearls, craggy antlers of dead coral and glittering rhinestone seahorses; these unfortunate mannequins looked like mermaids who’d fallen into Poseidon’s treasure chest and come out much the worse for wear.

  I encountered yet more seashell trinkets in a rather unexpected place. At London’s Natural History Museum I was invited to go behind the scenes to the basement rooms, where their phenomenal shell collection is kept. They have millions of specimens, catalogued and neatly arranged species by species, but as I walked in the first thing I saw was a glass-fronted cupboard housing a miscellany of altogether more peculiar objects. The curators call this their ‘cabinet of horrors’. It contains the various shell paraphernalia they’ve been given over the years; some are real shells, others are plastic replicas. Among the gubbins there are ornamental ships with sails made from scallops, and a telephone shaped like a conch shell, taking the phrase ‘a word in your shell-like’ to its logical conclusion after the Victorians noted that human ears have a spiralling shape similar to shells. There’s a tiny shell-covered piano, and a stack of cowrie shells, each with plastic eyes and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles that transforms them into studious turtles. Gluing a pair of wobbly eyes on a cowrie is harmless enough, I suppose, but it’s a far cry from the men and women who buried their dead with shells in a sign of great respect and mourning. I’m not saying we should go back to placing shells in graves, but you’ve got to admit that it’s funny how things change.

  Even when they’re not being sculpted into truly horrible ornaments, seashells have gained something of a reputation as clichéd emblems of the beach and disposable tokens of all things nautical. Lots of us live in cities – permanently tuned into the digital world and out of the natural world – so it’s perhaps no surprise that when shoppers buy flip-flops studded with cowries, or shell necklaces, or lampshades made from Windowpane Oyster shells, most will have no idea where these things came from, or realise that they were made by living, wild animals.

  Despite all this, there is still something about seashells that even in our busy modern lives makes many of us stop and wonder for a moment. We find them on beaches, we enjoy the feel of them in our hands, and we hold them to our ears to see if the stories are true about the sound of waves getting trapped inside. Then we take them home and arrange them on bookshelves or in the bathroom, where they remind us of a tranquil day at the coast and equip us with delicate connections to the sea. As well as being something elegant to look at, and a small treasure we found for ourselves, the shells whisper tempting questions. Where do all the shells come from? Who or what sculpts them? How are they made and, perhaps more intriguingly, why?

  This book will answer those questions, and many more besides. It is my attempt to set the record straight, to throw out the novelty knick-knacks and reinstate seashells to their rightful place as glorious objects that can tell us so many things. I will show how seashells can offer us insights into the minds of our distant ancestors, and teach us about beauty and form and the curiosities of life on Earth. I will tell the stories of some of the people who have devoted themselves to shells; people who have used them in ways that make the afterlife of seashells both surprising and splendid. And I will put the animals back inside their shells and reveal the extraordinary lives of the shell-makers.

  Take the seashells known as Giant Tritons, named after the Greek demigod and often used to make trumpets in the real world. Now and then they can be spotted swaggering around on coral reefs in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, their huge shells in tow; with handsom
e, elongated twists like polished tortoiseshell and bigger than an actual trumpet, these are one of the largest and finest of all the seashells. From under a triton’s shell protrudes a single, muscly foot covered in leopard spots, a pair of yellow and black striped tentacles, and a pair of piggy eyes. Their highly sensitive tentacles probe and taste the water for the whiff of dangerous animals that plenty of other reef denizens hope never to bump into.

  Crown-of-thorns Starfish are the size of car wheels and are covered in a tangle of venomous prongs and spines. They clamber up onto living colonies of coral, flop out their stomach through their mouth and digest the hapless creatures below before slurping up their liquefied remains. These starfish are formidable beasts, but they are utterly petrified by tritons. Place the starfish in an aquarium and pump in seawater that has recently washed over a triton and the normally sedate starfish will spring to life and do its best to clamber out of the tank and scram. In the wild, when a triton catches up with a Crown-of-thorns Starfish, it is somehow immune to the noxious spines. The hunter smothers its victim with its huge foot, chews a hole through its tough skin and dribbles in saliva that seems to paralyse the starfish. Then it’s feeding time for the triton.

  Being partial to coral-munching starfish, tritons could play an important part in keeping reef ecosystems healthy. In the past, plague-like outbreaks of Crown-of-thorns Starfish on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have been blamed on the decline of triton populations, possibly due to shell-collectors and trumpet-makers taking too many of these beautiful shells away. It’s been assumed that without their predators the starfish proliferate until swarms of them are marching across reefs, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Certainly, there have been outbreaks of hundreds and thousands of starfish that do serious damage to areas of reef, stripping away the living, colourful tissue and exposing the bare white skeletons. In the past, some rescue attempts haven’t exactly helped things when people gathered up starfish, chopped them into little pieces – to make sure they were quite dead – and threw them back in the sea. It took an embarrassingly long time for someone to point out that a whole new starfish can regrow from a small fragment, so all they were doing was giving the outbreak a helping hand. It is, however, unclear whether vanishing tritons really have been responsible for kick-starting these plagues. A single starfish meal can feed a triton for a week, so it would take a lot of tritons to keep these reef marauders in check. However, seeing how tritons make crown-of-thorns freak out, it is possible they could disrupt starfish aggregations, shooing them away and reducing their chances of successful breeding. Crown-of-thorn outbreaks could well be a natural phenomenon (the jury is still out on how much human actions are implicated, even when they aren’t helping the starfish to multiply) but they are undoubtedly a problem that coral reefs could do without. Coral reefs protect coastlines from storms, waves and rising sea levels, and provide food and livelihoods for millions of people, but they are in grave danger from numerous threats, most worryingly climate change. These vital habitats need to be as healthy as possible to give them a fighting chance of adapting and coping with the stressful modern world, and patrolling tritons are likely to play their part in a diverse, resilient ecosystem.

  As we will see, the world has come to depend in many ways on seashells and the animals that make them. They perform all manner of crucial roles, from feeding people and other animals to creating habitat and providing new medicines. Wherever shell-makers dwindle or disappear, their absence leaves troublesome holes in the fabric of life, ones that are difficult or impossible to fill.

  When tritons plus all the other shell-makers are dead and gone they leave behind their empty shells, which come in a dazzling variety of shapes, sizes and colours. Some are named after things they remind us of: there are sundial shells, moon shells, bubble shells, bonnet, turban, crown and helmet shells. Some shells look like vases, and some like unicorn horns. There are shells that resemble strawberries or ice-cream sundaes; others look like coffee beans; and it’s easy to imagine the deep red Oxheart Clam will start throbbing and beating any minute. There is a whole group of shells called angelwings whose delicately corrugated shells might persuade the staunchest of atheists to believe that heavenly messengers have fallen to Earth. And while most shells would fit snugly in the palm of your hand, there are many that are smaller than a pinhead, and some as wide as your outstretched arms that can weigh more than a pair of newborn elephants.

  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.