by Skye Moody
(But why should she worry? She’s wearing half the world’s amber supply around her neck.)
“But every once in a while,” she adds as if to comfort me, “a beachcomber can find a piece of true amber on the Baltic beaches.”
Yeah, sure, like one day the tide will deliver up my own special chunk of amber here on the shore of this Latvian fishing village, and it will land right at my feet and be mine to treasure or trade.
“Maybe you should try Estonia,” suggests Mrs. Stramanos.
“Already tried,” I say. “Any other ideas?”
Mrs. Stramanos is a patient woman, a good thing considering our size difference. Her broad hand drops onto my shoulder, its pinky finger sporting a new acquisition, a honey-colored cabochon loaded with exotic prehistoric detritus. “Listen, dear,” she says, the way a pro golfer explains double bogies to a novice, “you need to know what you are looking for. And then you need to know which beaches to search, and how the currents flow, and how to watch the tides, and where to search among the wrack.”
I scratch the side of my face. “Let me ask you this,” I say. “Where did you find all your amber?”
Mrs. Stramanos’s fingers caress her amber-clotted breast. “These? Why, I found them in Riga,” she says, “in a little shop in Priditis Street. They have a marvelous catalog order service, too.”
Shell Lust
Manhattanite Sarah Soffer collects old bones. Sarah is especially fond of piscine and marine mammal remains washed ashore on coastal beaches. She’s a photographer and enjoys arranging the remains against simple backdrops and taking their pictures, sort of intimate postmortem portraits. I once tried interesting Sarah in seashells but she turned her nose up. “It’s not the same as bones,” she sniffed. “Bones are more personal.” I wonder about that. Seashells are bones worn on the outside.
If humans wore their skeletons on the outside, would they be more enamored of themselves? If, like most mollusks, we went around in bony armor to protect our soft flesh, our tender organs, would we flaunt our bones? Wear them haughtily and be less fearful of predators? What would we look like as exoskeleton creatures?
Clams, scallops, snails, and other marine mollusks have an amazing ability to disguise and protect themselves with their skeletons, some so intricately constructed, so architecturally ingenious that great architectural projects have been modeled after them. Take the Euplectella aspergillum, for example, better known as the Venus flower basket. If a VFB washed up at Sarah’s pretty feet, I guarantee she wouldn’t spurn it.
Eco and ecto skeletons.
The Venus flower basket is a sponge with a hollow cylindrical glass skeleton, generally ten to eleven inches long, a fragile phallic scaffolding constructed of intricately latticed woven glass. It attaches itself to the ocean floor with glass fibers that resemble the finest spun angel hair. Its shaft resembles tulle netting surrounded by swirled glass bracings. It is one of the world’s rarest and most prized bits of flotsam, found only occasionally washed up intact on the beaches of Cebu island, in the Philippines, where it lives at depths of fifteen hundred to fifteen thousand feet in the Western Pacific Ocean. Frequently, a pair of tiny shrimp will enter through the bone-white latticework and grow until they are too big to leave the “bridal chamber”; thus encased, certainly bored, they eventually mate. What else is there to do in jail? When their offspring hatch, the little brine swim through the latticework openings, but the larger parents are trapped for life inside the structure. In parts of Japan, the Venus flower basket is a traditional wedding gift, meant to represent a lifetime commitment. Interpret this as you will.
Western architects have begun studying the design of the Venus flower basket, hoping to translate its inherent strength into the structural design of high-rise towers. Joanna Aizenberg, a researcher at Bell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, New Jersey, published a paper in the journal Science, saying the VFB’s elaborate structure represents “major fundamental construction strategies such as laminated structures, fiber-reinforced composites, bundled beams and diagonally reinforced square-grid cells.” In other words, high-rise towers like I. M. Pei’s Hong Kong Bank Building with its diagonally reinforced beams, London’s Swiss Tower, and Paris’s Eiffel Tower all imitate nature, except, unlike the Venus flower basket, they provide exits. Scientists have also discovered that the VFB and other bottom-dwelling sponges in the genus Euplectella possess filaments able to conduct light “as well as or better than the best fiber-optic cable.”
I own two Venus flower baskets. I keep them wrapped in tissue paper inside cylindrical boxes inside an Asian chest. Every once in a while I carefully remove these fragile skeletons, marvel at their strange beauty, and thank God I’m not a trapped shrimp.
The Venus flower basket was once a living organism.
My friend Sarah would certainly appreciate the bone-like appearance of the Venus flower basket. As for the sponge’s ability to trap mating pairs, Sarah would sniff and say, “It’s a matter of interpretation.” Which brings us back to the seashell, these beached skeletons of mollusks, sea animals who built their bones for armor.
Think of it: a skeleton worn on the outside. Once the organs fail, once the flesh succumbs, all that’s left is bones, and, frankly, humans have nothing to brag about, being somewhat the cuttlefish of mammals. Compare a typical everyday human skeleton with the shell of a Tahitian heart cockle, or a suggestive violet-lipped Cassidula nucleus from the Philippines, or yellow-lined Strombus fasciatus from the Gulf of Aqaba, in Sinai, Egypt, or the African turbo with its mahogany veneer over mother-of-pearl, or even the simple abalone, the plate limpet, for criminy sake, or the fighting conch. How dare we humans brag about our bones?
Because most mollusks wear their skeletons on the outside, providing shelter and defense, beachcombers often forget that something might be living inside these shells, which have always enjoyed currency in human cultures. Traded as money, used for medicinal purposes, talismans, as ornaments or objets d’art, seashells have sparked human curiosity ever since Cro-Magnon man stood on the strandline and marveled—if Cro-Magnon was capable of marveling—at them rolling in on the tides.
The tropical marine mollusk Cypraeidae, or cowrie, develops a brightly colored shell with a long central column that works like a human spine. Cro-Magnon man wore the cowrie shell to stave off sterility. Apparently it didn’t work so well. The pit dwellers of prehistoric England used cowries for lucre, as jewelry, and as talismans, as did the Saxons in Germany. In pre-dynastic Egypt, cowries were named for the Latin Cypraea, which has the same root as Cyprus, the birth-place of Venus, or Aphrodite. One look at the entrance to the cowrie shell’s erotically suggestive interior reveals why. Marco Polo, on the other hand, visualized cowries as “little pigs”; thus he dubbed them porcellana, a word eventually used by Europeans to describe Chinese porcelain, the delicate surfaces being reminiscent of the smooth cowrie shell.
In ancient China, cowrie shells were incorporated into burial rites: While a commoner’s corpse had its mouth filled with rice, an emperor was buried with cowries stuffed in his mouth—nine cowries being the maximum, and I suppose it depended on how big the emperor’s mouth was. Feudal lords merited seven cowries in the mouth, while high officers only got to suck five, and ordinary officers tucked three. An exception was made for commoners of great wealth; a latter-day Donald Trump or Bill Gates, for example, received a small cowrie on the last molar on each side of the mouth to ensure the departed soul had enough to eat and spend in the next life, implying, perhaps, that certain privileged cowrie suckers can take it with them.
In Bengal, cowries were small change, not a king’s ransom. In East Africa, Arabs used cowries both as money and female fertility charms; they were also thought to deflect the evil eye. Burial sites near the Caspian Sea in the Caucasus Mountains reveal the use of various families of mollusk shells as lucre to help transport souls. In Africa, especially in Uganda in the nineteenth century, cowries were traded as currency.
&nbs
p; The Old Testament describes Adam and Eve fleeing Paradise, clasping fig leaves to their private parts. I’m not sure why their beaded jewelry wasn’t mentioned. It’s a fact that the beads came first. Even before the first recorded sinners clasped ficus to genitalia, Cro-Magnon was decorating his body with beads made from seashells washed up near his seaside cave. Cro-Magnon males made beaded jewelry from shells of univalves or gastropods—snails, whelks, and conchs-strung on plant vines. The craft of bead making developed parallel to tool fabrication, and eventually these prehistoric hippies figured out how to slice abalones into small pieces that revealed the excellent character of the shell’s mother-of-pearl lining. Cowries, too, were sliced for their inner beauty. Much later, professional bead makers would agree that the naturally worn surface of an Indonesian blue-backed cowrie shell cannot be matched by artificially induced versions.
Ever wonder what the world’s oldest professionals were paid for their services? Or why Cro-Magnon man traipsed around wearing stacks of beaded necklaces? A simple leap of logic explains why he frequented the strand, beachcombing for cowries.
Even today, Homo sapiens derive pleasure from stringing flotsam around their necks and limbs, hanging it like tree ornaments from their ears. Mrs. Stramanos is just one example of this phenomenon; think of Don Ho and his Hawaiian shell chokers.
Linnaeus, when developing his mollusk classification system, named the quahog Mercenarius (Venus); and America’s first form of exchange for value, wampum, from the Algonquin word wampumpeag, meaning a string of white beads, was made from the quahog shell. While less prized wampum was carved from white shells of whelks and conchs, usually from a shell’s central column, the most valued wampum was fashioned from quahog shells, an Atlantic Ocean native that bears a patch of deep violet on the interior face. “Council wampum” was carved by Native Americans, such as the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne around Lake Oneida, New York. These were later imitated by European factories, but the production-line versions were not as prized. Among Native Americans, wampum was highly symbolic, offered in kinship affirmation rituals and condolences. French explorer Jacques Cartier, in 1535, observed an analogy between the uses of wampum by Native Americans and the Europeans’ use of precious metals like gold and silver. Thus, at least to the European mind, wampum developed a reputation as “currency.”
Today, the quahog is less prolific, having been overexploited. Pollution in the near-shore waters where quahog mollusks once thrived has caused the distinctive violet patch to shrink. Still, if you’ve never seen the violet insides of a quahog shell, well, you simply haven’t lived.
Mollusks have been collected off beaches for their colors alone. For more than thirty-five hundred years, humans have squeezed dye from mollusks of the genus Murex, using it to color their bodies and their clothing. Early records date back to Crete, but some historians believe Neolithic man was already using mollusk juice to decorate himself. Because dye making was labor intensive and too costly for the commoner—three hundred pounds of liquid Murex dye for every fifty pounds of wool—the color it produced became associated with royalty. Antony and Cleopatra’s sails were tyrian purple, with dye derived from the same mollusk family mixed with the red dye produced from whelks. During his reign, Nero was the only Roman permitted to wear tyrian purple. Incredibly, mummy wrappings dyed with mollusk purple have retained their color over several thousand years.
Central Americans in the sixteenth century learned to squeeze purple juices from mashed Purpura patula snails they collected on beaches. During the Spanish occupation, the dye derivative was shipped to Spain to dye noblemens’ cloaks and vests. Back in the colonies, the shell mashers eventually figured out that smashing snails endangered the animal population, so they taught themselves to blow into the snail’s shell, causing the dye to dribble out. The snails were replaced in their habitats, free to reproduce, arguably one of humankind’s first efforts at conserving an endangered species.
Even more fabulous than the whelk and mollusk dye is what ancient Mediterranean divers discovered on the seafloor: the noble pen shell, perhaps the most fascinating article ever brought up from the sea. The noble pen mollusk anchors itself to the seafloor with fine golden threads about two feet long, strong enough to hold the animal steady in the wake of powerful currents and undertow. Jason seeking the Golden Fleece may have been pursuing the noble pen’s threads. From ancient times, these exquisite golden threads have been sewn into the clothing of the wealthy classes.
It’s a fact that fashion designers for millennia have aspired to the shapes, textures, lines, and weave of seashells. Like architects studying the structural design of the Venus flower basket, certain organically oriented clothing designers strive to decorate the human body in Neptune’s colors and patterns. Scientists envy sponges and mollusks, more so because they can’t yet exactly match their designs, but with the advances in 3-D software technology, we may soon crack the code. It is entirely possible in coming epochs that we humans may see the advantages in turning ourselves inside out in order to survive. More fantastic evolutionary moments have occurred.
A seashell is most vibrant when the animal is still living inside it. Once it dies, the shell gradually begins to deteriorate and fade. Exposed to sunlight, seashells lose their beauty and luster, and caring for them over long periods of time requires a conchologist’s expertise. Seashell guidebooks often warn beachcombers to check federal, state, and local laws protecting marine life before going shelling on a beach. They also, with a straight face, warn against harvesting shells whose animals are still alive and residing within. I have often wondered how this applies to the turbans and the conchs and other architecturally complex shells. Does one knock? Ring a bell? Shout, “Anybody home?”
I remember as a child that a female adult in my family, perhaps an aunt, frequently sported a particular necklace—a spiky fire-orange choker that looked like, if she cocked her head, it would puncture her jugular vein. No one knows how many necklaces, bracelets, hair ornaments, earrings, rings, Bedouin prayer beads, carvings, calcium supplements, and kitschy souvenirs have been created since humans first began mining coral reefs, but over the millennia of human accessorizing, with perhaps the single exception of the Cro-Magnon fetish for shells, coral has enjoyed top billing among fashionistas, even being hailed recently as a summer must-have accessory.
Coral washes up on the strangest beaches. I plucked my first piece of coral off the tide at Myrtle Edwards Park in downtown Seattle. Little white spiky thing, not nearly as lovely as auntie’s jugular wrap, still, coral. Since that first find, I’ve collected small bits of white coral from beaches in California and Oregon. And this is how eBay’s coral hawkers claim they acquired the precious fire-orange and deep red stuff they offer online. Not so. Yet those items of jewelry and souvenir kitsch represent only a tiny fraction of coral reef demolition. A flotsamist, therefore, who happens upon pieces of coral on a beach should thank the stars for such good luck and treat it kindly, for once it was alive and thriving and serving the kingdom of the sea.
Some beach shells seem to stare at you.
Barnacles
The barnacle is a curious bit of organic flotsam, and honestly, one of my favorites. Charles Darwin spent eight years studying barnacles, and his monograph on them is still required reading for marine biologists. The two-volume masterpiece, published in 1851 and 1854, describes the barnacle’s curious physical features, its free-swimming young, and its feeding habits. Whether or not they’ve read Darwin’s masterpiece, accomplished beachcombers know barnacles intimately, either from nasty cuts to bare feet or from finding the perfect glass ball fishing float washed up and encrusted in hitchhiking barnacles. For centuries barnacles were thought to be mollusks related to oysters, clams, and mussels because they seemed to possess a shell. Darwin and his contemporaries, however, had observed the barnacles’ wandering offspring, placing the animal in the order of crustaceans, like shrimp and lobster. What had been misnomered “shell” was actually lay
ers of calcareous plates the animal secretes as protection.
The horseshoe life preserver washed up long ago is now covered with barnacles.
A barnacle’s life is not necessarily boring. True, if you were stuck to a boulder that never moved from its position on the tide line, life might prove a yawn. But imagine being attached to a cargo vessel, traveling across the oceans to exotic ports where you mix and mingle with other barnacles stuck to other cargo vessels. Or how about riding a whale? This is as adventurous as barnacle life gets, but I know humans with duller lives. At least humans can perambulate; barnacles, once attached, are stuck for life. Fused by its own strong glue, to driftwood, or rocks, a crab or whale’s body, or to a ship’s hull, the barnacle goes where its ride goes. Necky goose barnacles are fond of sticking themselves to wood pilings or ships’ hulls from which they dangle headfirst into the water. Their bodies are confined between plates shaped more or less like a goose bill, and legend had it that they would hatch into “barnacle geese,” thus the goose moniker.
The more common acorn barnacle attaches its neckless plated armor directly onto whatever it chooses to ride; cemented headfirst, its feathery feet protrude, waggling for food. Spawn is ejected from the hermaphrodite’s elongated penile tube in hopes of fertilizing its neighbor. Such is barnacle sex.
Barnacles damage hull paint and often clog drainpipes opening into the ocean. They have justly earned the sobriquet “most prolific fouling marine animal.” And all along we thought that title belonged to humans.
Never underestimate the sticking power of a barnacle; cements like Superglue were first developed from studying barnacle glue. Patent or not, I would personally be loathe to have my glue taken, and, anyway, barnacles deserve far more respect than they currently enjoy. Research has shown that barnacles possess a remarkable ability to accumulate concentrations of poisonous metals, suggesting potential applications for cleaning up pollution. For decades marine biologists have used barnacles as a measure of pollution levels in saltwater. Flotsamists know that barnacles stuck to flotsam indicate the object has spent a long time at sea. This is an important clue when attempting to identify how far and how long a piece of flotsam has traveled on the ocean. And, of course, like every sea animal, the lowly barnacle has found a place in haute cuisine. Next time you see barnacles on the menu, think glue.
