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

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ever 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 handsome, 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.

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