Helen Scales
speaker
228 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Helen Scales’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They do fly through the water.
Instead of one little foot, they slither around on.
They break it into two and flip around like a butterfly.
And they're teeny tiny.
Yes.
Really fast as well, like razor clams.
Clams and snails.
Well... You barely scratched the surface.
I guess I'd love to talk about that we're still discovering species as well, and that we've got tens of thousands we already know, but more are being found all the time, a lot of them in the deep sea.
One of my favourites is the scalyfoot snail, which lives on hydrothermal vents, these extreme hot springs that have heat to hundreds of degrees and are extraordinary habitats, but full of life.
And the scalyfoot snail is one of those, found in the Indian Ocean in around 2000, I think.
And they have this weird thing that their shells are made out of what seems to be an iron-based compound and their feet are covered in scales.
They have this sort of weird looking scaly armour.
And when they were first discovered, I think people generally, scientists generally assumed that that armour was...
That iron-based shell and the scales were some sort of defence from attack from the outside.
But actually it turns out that they're defending themselves from an attack from within.
Because like many things that live on hydrothermal vents, they have symbiotic microbes living inside their bodies.
That's how they get their food.
These are cells that are using chemicals in the water to grow, essentially, rather than sunlight.
And these microbes inside the snails, they're very good, they provide food, but then a by-product of this food production is sulphur.
Showing 201–220 of 228 · page 11 of 12
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