Shells have played many roles in history, from money to jewelry. But they also hold the secrets of ocean health.

The following is an excerpt from Cynthia Barnett's "The Sound of the Sea: Shells and the Fate of the Sea".

One hundred thousand years ago, a human cousin walked along the Mediterranean Sea on the rocky ribbed beach, head down, scanning the coastline with big eyes. She stopped from time to time, bent down her strong body, and picked up a shell.

Among the polished threads and sturdy half shells washed ashore a few miles from her cave, the Neanderthal girl knew exactly what she was looking for: a sea scallop shell of a certain size and shape—about an inch wide, Perfect round shape with a natural hole on the top.

She is also very picky about this hole. She collected those shells with the holes she thought were most suitable for threading. Her appreciation of shells that transcend food, and her imagination to string them together as necklaces or other purposes, will help scientists to overturn nearly two centuries of assumptions and poorly conceived that Neanderthals are stupid beasts. science.

Voice of the Sea: Shells and the Fate of the Ocean

Sea scallop shells collected during the Neanderthal era were found fused in the throat of a sea cave overlooking the port of Cartagena, Spain. Several other contemporaneous shells found in the cave were harvested alive and can be eaten. Archaeologists can tell from their flawless outline that they have never hit a rocky shore.

The clam has fallen empty on the beach. Someone collects them deliberately, but not for food. A bittersweet shell was painted red. The other comes from a spiny oyster that has a long second life as a cosmetic box. It still retains a red pigment made by hand grinding of hematite, pyrite and other minerals, which are naturally not found in the cave.

These years passed, and the powder still gleamed. And the girl's human cousins ​​are still picking up shells.

When I read about the Neanderthal shell cache, I wondered if the collector could be a child. I imagined a little girl about five years old. That was my daughter's age. On a beach weekend on the east coast of Florida, she became obsessed with collecting only shells with perfect holes on the top to string necklaces and driftwood phones.

That was the year of the bead in our house. In an accurately sorted fishing tackle box, she collected colorful beads and transparent beads, owl beads and Scottish dog beads, and alphabet beads to spell out her friend's name and I♥u. Now, as we walk slowly along the shore of seashells and seaweed carved by the high tide, the genes of the same collector are turned on in the Atlantic Ocean. Her focused silence amplifies the sound of breaking waves around us, the calls of seagulls overhead, and the clinking of shells hitting her purple sand bucket. She skipped the shiny olive shells, shark eyes and other coiled prizes on the wet sand. Like our ancestors, Ilana chose round half shells: orange Atlantic clams, purple striped calico scallops, and pendant-sized surf clams with hard candy stripes and colors, with a small round hole on the top.

When she chose all the things she wanted, she wrote her name in capital letters on the beach, and the name of our small town within a few hours inland, just like signing on Neptune’s king’s shell invoice Same.

Ten years later, those shells are still hidden here in our inland town, packed in a heavy small bag, and pushed behind the cabinet in my study. They have been hiding there since I rescued them from a pile of household debris, and my husband is about to throw them away for spring cleaning. The shell necklaces and mobile phones we string on the fishing line have long been broken and thrown away. But I can't let myself throw away the shells carefully selected by kindergarten children, especially now that she is a teenager and keeps a certain distance from us.

I know many other shell hideouts and have inherited one. My mother-in-law once gave me a hand-painted porcelain cup from the porcelain cabinet of her late mother. The exquisite heritage is not porcelain, but the two dozen clinking shells inside, shimmering in pale yellow and orange. My husband's grandmother and her young daughters collected translucent "mermaid toenails" on the beach of Peconic Bay on Long Island. She hid the memory in the small cup. Seventy years later, when I carefully checked their transparent shapes with my fingers, the shells still clinked. They are finer than porcelain, but they are an order of magnitude stronger.

From prehistoric seashell worship to an amazing number of Pokémon characters inspired by mollusks, no creature can arouse human admiration for so long or so intimately.

I want to know how many small and heavy shell bags and boxes are in the cupboards and closets from Muskegon to Mumbai; it is close to the sea and several miles from the sea. Of all the natural wonders accumulated by Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, for me, the most striking is a small Money Cowrie, the Monetaria moneta that the founder did not acquire. An unremarkable shell was found in an underground pit under the slave house. A hole on the back of the shell and two grooves rubbed by a thread that had passed through the shell are part of the evidence, suggesting that it may have been brought to Virginia by an enslaved African. The shell may be attached to the clothes, or somehow survived as a necklace.

It may be a person's secret hideout; a connection with home.

The shell is also a home. It is an animal's life's work. It secretes it layer by layer with minerals in the surrounding environment. Consider molluscs; soft animals are known for the shells they build, not the life inside. The second largest group of animals behind arthropods, including insects, mollusks are everywhere-from hundreds of snail species high in the Himalayas to bony white clams that gather in the deepest part of the earth and filter the hydrothermal vents of the Mariana Trench. The Pacific Ocean.

Shells are the products of marine mollusks, which are the most diverse group of animals in the ocean. They inhabit the tiny world-the spiral-shaped Ammoni-cera is washed on beaches all over the world, and its delicate stripes are too small to appreciate; and the vast world-Tridacna gigas, or giant clams, weighing hundreds of Pounds, and glowed with millions of microalgae.

Shells are money before coins, jewelry before gems, and art before canvas.

Marine molluscs inhabit coral reefs, rocks, seagrass, beaches and mudflats, and countless places. The purple sea snail Janthina janthina lives only in tropical surface waters. It is a mollusk Huck Finn floating on its bubble raft. If something goes wrong with its self-made ship, Purple Shell Hack will sink and die. The slender Tibia fusus squats deep in the sand, thanks to its siphon, which draws water through a slender shell tube to breathe, like a hypodermic needle in a vial. Carry snails (Xenophoridae) to stick other shells, coral fragments, and even small pebbles on their own shells, carefully camouflaging them.

Marine mollusks are vegetarians and cannibals, fish hunters and filter feeders, algae distillers and carrion eaters. They are sedentary spots for jumping and swimming. Shy people have created the most gorgeous buildings ever. The soft invertebrates make some of the hardest building materials known. The fragile species with the longest evolutionary history of any living thing today.

From prehistoric seashell worship to an amazing number of Pokémon characters inspired by mollusks, no creature can arouse human admiration for so long or so intimately. However, even in the era of our street extinction rebellion, images of endangered species are projected 1,250 feet on the side of the Empire State Building, mollusks are still almost entirely anonymous artists.

The huge piles of shells on the earth — oysters, conch shells and other shells piled on the coast of the world — have proven their importance as food, at least since the early Stone Age. Raw or roasted molluscs often satisfy our appetite. Their iron, zinc and other nutrients that promote brain development may help evolve larger brains, thus making us humans.

But it is their shells that inspire our imagination. Shells are money before coins, jewelry before gems, and art before canvas. The fossil mussel shells found on the banks of the Solo River in Java, Indonesia are home to the "Javanese" and are carved with geometric zigzags purposefully hand-carved 500,000 years ago. The decorated shells represent the cognition of our predecessors Homo erectus and some of the oldest art in the world.

Shells are the earliest known souvenirs buried in tombs. The small cone shell Conus ebraeus remains rosy after 75,000 years of burial. The stubby cone was unearthed from the grave of a four- to six-month-old baby in a large rock shelter called the Border Cave in South Africa. It was cut by hand, strung on a pendant, worn for many years, and then placed on a baby in the Stone Age.

Shells are the most collected natural objects along with rocks; they are easier to gather than butterflies and more affordable than gems. They are collected by children and kings. Shell series were unearthed from the ruins of the ancient city of Pompeii. Their loyal enthusiasts, known as conchologists, admit that they are a little crazy. But even for casual admirers strolling along the beach or in museum exhibitions, the polished shape will attract: the perfect symmetry of Chambered Nautilus. Queen conch pink gloss lips. Abalone pearlescent inlay. The special spines of the Murex-the raptor claws of some species, the delicate doll combs of other species. The trumpet sounded in the distance, and the wisdom of the sea came in my ears.

We have been trying to listen to the sound of shells. Surprisingly, they often lead us to the clear truth in dark times. Shells of unfamiliar species like ammonites provide evidence of evolution and extinction. This is an age of loyalty, when God makes all living things eternal perfection at the same time. The shell on the top of the mountain tells the story of the movement of the continents and the rise and fall of the oceans, illuminating the earth’s history that is six thousand years older than the Bible. In the canyon walls, cliff edges and underground strata, ocean shells record five billion years of fossil diaries, leaving behind one of the most complete archives of past life and global changes on earth.

Just as they carry the memory of the earth in the mountains, or the memory of the mother in a small cup, shells are a more accurate record of human history, rather than those who must write it down. Shell Midden once rose up in North America like temples in the ancient world. Some early scientists and historians believed that they were just the garbage dump of nomads. But these shells — houses, temples, and public buildings outlined by hands long ago, or buried in ancient cemeteries and shell factories — established pre-Columbian major cities on the American soil. The "Huge Shell City" clearly shows that the new world is not new, let alone settled by bearded men on sailing ships. All over the world, shells are correcting history and verifying facts.

The Portuguese archaeologist João Zilhão has spent his career digging into rock bunkers and caves to understand the way of life of the Neanderthals. Deciphering their ocean shells from caves in Spain's Iberian Peninsula helped him illuminate the wisdom of the Neanderthals, as well as their human nature. Cockles and several tantalizing shell discoveries prove that the concepts of symbolism and beauty predate modern humans in anatomy.

As people interacted with more outsiders in the early days, scallop shell necklaces or other shell pendants may be a way to show personal identity or pledge allegiance to social groups. Coastal residents naturally decorate themselves with marine animals. Farther inland, the decorations are eagle claws or mammal teeth. Once the trading network took off, the extraordinary attraction of shells kept them away from their ocean homes. Different types of spiny oysters or conch are found in Neolithic cemeteries throughout Europe and in the rituals and jewelry of the pre-Columbian culture in the south. This is a wild spike, blood with sparkling Neanderthal powder Red bivalves. In the Americas, they reached the top of the Andes from the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

I asked Zilhão whether the scallop shells hidden in the Neanderthal cave could be collected by children. He did not hesitate. "Children and adolescents are more open to discovery," he said. "People might guess that this use for important social purposes was originally caused by children's play; this series started with a child helping to fish or shellfish fishing on the coast, and then running to pick up these beautiful objects.

"The aesthetics of a shell has some basic elements that make the brain happy. It must be very powerful. This is not just symbolic thinking. It is a very modern feeling of beauty."

On a sultry June night, at a ballroom shell auction in Captiva, Florida, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote her 1955 beloved shell wisdom book "Gift from the Sea" (Gift From the Sea) on the barrier island, I saw two collectors trying to bid for scarlet turtles. Its two halves are still connected to the hinges, and the shell is large and round, like a baseball, covered with at least a hundred curved spines, protruding long and short like the pincushion of a protozoan.

I admire these two modern women very much. They long for a species that was once revered as the food of Pachamama by the indigenous people of the Andes. Pachamama is a fertility goddess and is considered the mother of the earth. Bids start at $50 and rise to a final price of $250 in a cautious $25 cardboard auction paddle.

It was not close to the highest price of a single shell that night. A man named Donald Dan bought a rare cracked shell for $2,000. Its cone-shaped grassland was built by a mysterious deep-sea mollusk named Entemnotrochus adansonianus bermudensis. Dan is a well-known shell dealer in Florida and grew up in the Philippines. His keen insight into shells during his childhood led him to be invited to participate in the Shell Club meeting at the Presidential Palace in Manila. Dan helped the police solve the case of the theft of rare shells from the American Museum of Natural History. He helped scientists identify many species. They named at least eight new species after him.

We have been trying to listen to the sound of shells. Surprisingly, they often lead us to the clear truth in dark times.

In the dangers of the ocean, shell collectors’ harm to molluscs may be compared to the impact of personal car travel and the cumulative carbon emissions of the global fossil fuel industry on the planet. How you drive your car is important because transportation is the largest source of emissions in the United States; our personal behavior reflects a greater spirit that can help us live within the ecological limits of the planet. However, if we do not change the larger industrial system that now breaks these restrictions, the lifestyle of a family will be meaningless.

The disappearance of molluscs and their shells in bays, beaches and estuaries is usually related to the destruction (including pollution) of their habitats. It is well known that molluscs clean up the surrounding water; scientists sometimes call them "the liver of the river." Like the liver, their soft body can only bear so much. The digestive glands of marine mollusks living near human coasts are full of dozens of pollutants, such as PCBs and pesticides, including DDT, which was banned in the United States in 1972, revealing how everything we put into the world returns To us. Plastics are spreading farther. Tropical islands that are not inhabited by humans are suffocated by sludge from grocery bags as thick as seaweed. The mollusks that inhabit the remotest Arctic and deepest seas are ingesting the microplastic fibers that fall off our yoga pants.

At the same time, humans’ favorite shell makers are loved by humans because of their beauty-such as the Conch Queen and Nautilus-and we are killing for their beauty. Other threatened species are not listed in this category and have not been studied too much, because mollusks do not attract the attention or research funding of animals like turtles and pandas, their eyes are large and affectionate, and they have no tentacles. The Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature-the official measure of the current sharp decline in animal populations worldwide-severely underestimates the loss of invertebrates, which is estimated to account for 97% of all living things.

The chapter of history fills in some missing things. The early American coastline was rich in oysters, scallops, and clams—and abalone on the west coast—and we dug them out or buried them alive to make way for coastal development. In 1609, when Henry Hudson drove his ship Half Moon into New York Harbor, he had to navigate 350 square miles of Oyster Reef. Within three centuries, oysters no longer settled in the port.

Colorful giant clams grow so abundantly along the shallow coast of the Indo-Pacific that the 19th-century British shell scientist Hugh Cuming described drifting past them for a mile on a collection trip. Today, the largest species are locally extinct in China, Taiwan, Singapore and many smaller islands, where their adductors (a delicious sashimi) and shells are overfished.

Ambitious restoration projects are underway in other historic Oyster Bays and giant clam nurseries in the Pacific in New York and around the world-some in top-secret locations to avoid poachers. Bringing back these pioneering creatures can help restore our shared oceans and establish the clean ocean farming we need to feed humans and save wild fish. However, their vulnerability to warming and acidifying oceans makes success far from certain.

We emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning coal and oil; manufacturing cement and plastic; leveling the world’s large forests are warming the earth unevenly. Compared with our life on land, the ocean and its life have been hit much harder. The ocean has silently absorbed 90% of the extra heat-some places have become too hot for mollusks. The ocean also absorbs one third of the carbon dioxide, which makes the acidity of the sea 30% higher than at the beginning of the industrial age.

This chemical change, known as ocean acidification, has begun to limit the carbonates that mollusks use to make shells. Acidic water can also dig into some shells, causing them to dent or corrode. The sea butterfly is one of the smallest shelled creatures in the world. It is a food source for other marine life including shorebirds and whales. Its shell is thin and hard, and it is particularly sensitive to changing ocean chemical reactions. Scientists around the world have found that these pteropods have thinned their outer shells or corroded their fragile outer layers.

The glowing fairies may signal what might happen to other shelled creatures as the ocean becomes more acidic. In the Pacific Northwest, young oysters die in large numbers, making it impossible to build shells in low-pH seawater. In California, scientists discovered a fundamental change in the way mussels construct smooth black shells and tried to adapt. In the laboratory, the ubiquitous periwinkle—small bivalves common on rocky coasts and soup bowls—formed a weaker shell when it encountered seawater that was slightly more acidic than it is now. In repeating the experiment of predicting acidity after a century, the shells of conch will deteriorate. Scallops and clams can build thinner houses. Scientists have discovered that the tritium shells that live near the leaks that predict future carbon dioxide levels are thinner than the shells under normal conditions - and one-third smaller. The great spiral blown by the Greek god Triton calms the sea or makes waves, and is sending a signal to us.

In William Wordsworth's autobiographical poem "Prelude," the narrator fell asleep at the beach and began to dream. He put the shell in his ear and listened

Harmonious loud prediction explosion;

An ode, uttered in passion, prophesied

The Child Who Destroyed the Earth

The flood is now in sight.

As people have believed for centuries, shells have not really echoed their native ocean. Nor do they predict the coming storm like the old superstition. Contrary to the more modern theories that still exist in some children's fact books, they do not amplify the sound of blood in our blood vessels.

No, when his narrator puts the shell in his ear and hears his own inner fear, the poet is closer to science. A huge spiral shell, such as conch, conch or Indian sacred conch, is simply the perfect resonance chamber. Just like a hand on the ear, it picks up environmental noise in the environment-accurately magnifying what is happening around us.

The modern signs of shells are as clear as the previous signs of the age of the earth or the rise and fall of ancient oceans. They also pointed to important solutions under the waves. Molluscs and the seagrass meadows where many molluscs began their lives can store tons of carbon. They built some of the most efficient houses in the world, as well as the best known storm barriers. They use sunlight and algae as fuel.

Just like a hand on the ear, it picks up environmental noise in the environment-accurately magnifying what is happening around us.

Their team includes the longest known animals — the burrowing Ocean Quahog, Arctica islandica, which can live more than four hundred years — and the longest surviving animal. The legendary Nautilus once lived in the warm acidic ocean before. They do have wisdom from the ocean.

This book was born on a record-breaking warm and rainy winter on Sanibel Island in southwestern Florida (the record is now broken), and every street there is named after the shells that washed ashore on the southern beach. Marine biologist José H. Leal invited me to give a lecture at the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum in Sanibel, which specializes in introducing shells and their makers. Lyle grew up near the beach in Rio de Janeiro, with the light body, leather bracelets and serene demeanor of a lifelong surfer. He is an expert on the biodiversity of mollusks and their changing scientific nomenclature. He is fluent in four languages ​​and can read two other languages. He has worked in the world's greatest collection of seashells, from the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and edited Nautilus, one of the oldest scientific journals of molluscs. However, he found his most important role in a place where a shell craft course was held, where visitors turned their attention to the masterpieces of nature. For Leal and many marine scientists I met in the following years, helping people understand what is happening in the world and their lives has become more important than their research. (I once asked Leal what he thought of shell craftsmanship; he would only say that some of his best friends glued their eyes to shells.)

Ten years before I met Leal, the Shell Museum surveyed visitors, many of whom were visitors to Florida and their children, to understand their knowledge of shells. The survey shows that 90% of tourists do not know that shells are made of live animals. Most people think they are stones.

Although the crisis of modern truth is political arrogance, it is also the result of separation from nature. When Pokémon characters are more familiar to children than the snail that helps inspire them, and when plastic drift is more common than shells on many beaches in the world, natural history and the struggle for survival of life are hard to know.

Excerpt from "The Sound of the Sea: Shells and the Destiny of the Sea". Copyright © 2021 Cynthia Barnett. Used with permission from the publisher WW Norton & Company, Inc. all rights reserved.

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Cynthia Barnett is a resident environmental reporter at the University of Florida and the author of "The Sound of the Sea: Shells and the Destiny of the Ocean" (WW Norton, 2021). She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

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