Stroll along an ocean beach and you might marvel at the sheer beauty of seashells — their perfect formation, their color and almost endless variety. But you can also look at a shell as a kind of biography of the animal that lived in it. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by DuPont.
Geerat Vermeij is a professor of geology at the University of California, in Davis — and one of the world’s leading authorities on seashells.
“I truly love these things. There are just the most wonderful and unexpected shapes and even though I’ve worked on shells for forty years or more, I still come across things that I simply marvel at. If we see a shell all by itself it’s a lovely piece of architecture. But it’s a part of a living animal. The snail or clam is literally attached to the shell, and so the shell has various functions. It functions as protection, once in a while it functions as a weapon. It generally protects the soft edible parts from would-be predators and of course also from environmental problems like heat and low salinity and so forth. So you can sort of think of the shell as a house, in some sense — a house that has to be functional for all the animal’s needs.”
Snails, clams and other mollusks make their shells with secretions of minerals drawn from their environment.
“One of the really neat things about shells is that a shell is actually the record, the whole life’s record, of an individual’s life span. ”
By examining a shell, experts can see growth rings, much like the rings in a tree trunk. They can determine when in its lifetime the animal reproduced, or was atttacked by another animal. We’ll hear more on seashells in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is presented by DuPont, bringing you the miracles of science, with additional support provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.
Shells - Biography
Seashells have growth rings much like the rings in a tree trunk. They're a kind of biography of the animal that once lived in it.
Air Date:07/04/2000
Scientist:
Transcript:
ambience: Seashore
Stroll along an ocean beach and you might marvel at the sheer beauty of seashells -- their perfect formation, their color and almost endless variety. But you can also look at a shell as a kind of biography of the animal that lived in it. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by DuPont.
Geerat Vermeij is a professor of geology at the University of California, in Davis -- and one of the world's leading authorities on seashells.
"I truly love these things. There are just the most wonderful and unexpected shapes and even though I've worked on shells for forty years or more, I still come across things that I simply marvel at. If we see a shell all by itself it's a lovely piece of architecture. But it's a part of a living animal. The snail or clam is literally attached to the shell, and so the shell has various functions. It functions as protection, once in a while it functions as a weapon. It generally protects the soft edible parts from would-be predators and of course also from environmental problems like heat and low salinity and so forth. So you can sort of think of the shell as a house, in some sense -- a house that has to be functional for all the animal's needs."
Snails, clams and other mollusks make their shells with secretions of minerals drawn from their environment.
"One of the really neat things about shells is that a shell is actually the record, the whole life's record, of an individual's life span. "
By examining a shell, experts can see growth rings, much like the rings in a tree trunk. They can determine when in its lifetime the animal reproduced, or was atttacked by another animal. We'll hear more on seashells in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is presented by DuPont, bringing you the miracles of science, with additional support provided by the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner.