Cynthia Barnett investigates shells and the way in which folks all over the world have regarded them in her fascinating scientific and cultural historical past, “The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans”.
For all their coloration, gloss, and architectural aptitude, the attract of seashells could have most to do with the geometric order of their varieties. The intricate patterns comply with evolutionary blueprints drafted in these earlier seas. Seen sideways with their two halves pressed collectively, the radial ribs of a cockle shell shut like a pair of wings round an awesome fowl. To stare into the spiral prime of a whelk or cone shell is to see the swirl of the Milky Way; a reminder that Native American folks as broadly separated because the Aztecs of Mexico and the Winnebago of Nebraska equated shells with stars.
Spiral seashells evoke galaxies due to their logarithmic sample of development, greatest seen in a cross part of the Chambered Nautilus. Each sleek coil is wider than the following by a continuing issue, making a nautilus shell one of the vital recognizable spirals in nature. Life loves logarithmic spirals. They formed the shells of tiny foraminifera, among the first marine microfossils studied in microscopes within the seventeenth century. They patterned the ammonites, fossil mollusks lengthy vanished, however shut sufficient to the dwelling nautilus that they emboldened scientists in the identical period to consider evolution and geologic change.
Nature’s exact aesthetic turned ours. The proof {that a} shell-inspired Leonardo da Vinci designed the left-handed spiral staircase at France’s Château de Blois divides architectural believers and skeptics to at the present time. Browse the pages of Leonardo’s notebooks, filled with coiling fossil shells and his personal sketched whorls, and depend me with the believers.
Seashells have been fashions for the unique minaret, the protecting portico, the scalloped edge, and numerous different iconic varieties now moved from sea to skyline: Antoni Gaudí’s vaulted rooftops in Catalonia; Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling Guggenheim Museum in New York; and Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House in Australia, the waterfront magnificence for which Utzon credit the fierce- trying cockscomb oyster, Lopha cristagalli.
Yet appreciating seashells other than the life that developed to construct them is like appreciating Leonardo for his pocket book sketches whereas overlooking his dwelling, respiration work.
Indeed, some mollusks have two retractable eyes, mounted on the tip of curious tentacles, that appear to comply with you just like the Mona Lisa. Others have 100 electrical blue eyes, set in dazzling rows. They are animals with rapacious tongues and rows of enamel to feed huge, wolf-hungry stomachs. They are animals that dive and leap. Animals that scurry throughout the ocean flooring, burrow down into sand, climb up rocks, flip corners, and flip somersaults. Animals that depart tracks like paws in mud. Animals that swim—propelled by wings sleek as butterflies or clapping shells, clunky like cartoon clams. Animals that ascend and descend within the water column; the Chambered Nautilus filling its sections with liquid and fuel like a grasp diver who spent half a billion years perfecting buoyancy.
They are animals that breathe and bleed and have a beating coronary heart. Yet our infatuation with them typically strikes solely after the guts has stopped.
