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
Slugs have lost their shells, but the snails that
that eat your vegetables and your flowers in your garden.
You know, their ancestors were mollusks that lived in the sea.
They live in forests, they live at the top of mountains.
I think the only thing mollusks that make shells that they haven't done, the only thing they haven't done is learn to fly, pretty much everything else.
What's really incredible to me is just how deeply and globally seashells have been this really important part of human lives and they've woven themselves into cultures for millennia, for countless millennia.
of that is that there's a practicality to it.
You know, we get a lot of food people have eaten, mollusks, clams, winkles, all sorts of things like that.
Mussels.
Mussels, exactly.
Oysters.
For, you know, for a long, long time, they've been important food.
And we know about that often because the shells are what are left behind and we get great big middens of those and they fossilise well.
And so we can look and see what people were eating in the past.
And often we
The shells themselves are materials.
They can be made into tools, knives, choppers, scoops for getting water out of canoes, bailing out canoes, that sort of thing.
But then there's this whole other side to shells, which goes even deeper into humanity, really, which is the symbolism and the fact that people all around the world have found seashells or have been given them perhaps from somewhere far away.
and have instilled in them great meanings of all sorts of kinds.
Often it's symbolisms of birth or death, possibly linked to their white colour.
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