Seashells

I keep finding photographs I took many years ago and had forgotten about. This one hasn't any great significance but I do remember taking it, on a beach in Tanzania, when I had decided to see how many different shells I could find quickly on what was, by local standards, a fairly unremarkable beach.

I don't know the names of all the shells but the two at centre bottom are small cowries, the globular ones around them are, I think, olives, the elongate one is a turret, and the two at top left are bivalves of some sort. I can't identify the one at top centre but it's interesting as it has a live hermit crab in it which is trying to escape from the picture.

Then, on my walk the next morning, I thought I would try the same little experiment on....

....a beach just a quarter of an hour's walk from our front door, in this case a shingle beach. I was fortunate that there was no-one else around as I doubt whether I would have grubbed around on my knees looking for shells had there been any witnesses.

This is the sum total of what I found in a ten-minute search. It's a little different from the Tanzanian beach inasfar as with it I had a real choice of shells to photograph. The top two rows, mostly yellow, are common periwinkles, Littorina littorea, the one at bottom left is a grey top shell Gibbula cineraria, and I haven't identified the other three on the bottom.

I don't think I proved or disproved anything with my experiment that I didn't already know - that, for reasons well beyond my ken, tropical shells are so much more varied and so much brighter in colour than those of the North Sea, and one does wonder why. It's the same with so many things - birds and butterflies spring to mind. It's as if our grey climate bleeds the colours out of our wildlife - with a few notable exceptions - leaving us so much the poorer.