Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (46 page)

Fatou Janha cheers on wrestlers at the Gambian Oyster Festival

An Oyster festival costume

A midden of Gambian oyster shells

A member of the TRY Oyster Women's Association shucks oysters

Celebrations at the festival

Triton
shells from the
Conchologia Iconia
, drawn by Lovell Reeve and based on shells at the Cuming Museum, 1843

Blue-ray Limpets, clustered on a kelp frond

The teeth of a Common Limpet seen under an electron microscope. These teeth are made of the strongest biological material known — all the better for scraping the limpet's algal food from rocks

A chambered nautilus, swimming in the sea off the island of Palau in Micronesia

A
Janthina
snail floats at the surface on a raft of bubbles, camouflaged against the open ocean by its blue shell and foot

A Veined Octopus peers from the bivalve shell that it uses as a hideaway

A female argonaut peeps from her shell, which she uses as a portable chamber to brood her young and control her buoyancy

A clutch of baby argonauts, each around 1mm long

Raw byssus from a single Noble Pen Shell