Liz Harper
speaker
123 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Liz Harper’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
How could we replicate what is actually a very low density but very tough material for things that we might want as humans?
But interestingly, if you look at the mollusks as a whole, then actually fewer and fewer groups through time are using that wonder microstructure.
They're using different microstructures.
And so it's really fascinating to think about why do you get
Well, there's not a good answer to that, or there's not a definite answer to that.
But one of the things, I talked about organic material being important, making the mineral work better in a shell.
Nacre has a lot of organic material in it, and it's probably that that helps make it tough and a bit elastic.
But we think that it's that organic component of a shell that's really very expensive metabolically for the animals to produce.
And it's entirely possible that actually it's just much easier to make a thicker, cheaper shell, which will do the job better and cheaper than laying this stuff down.
But it's really interesting because all the different groups, most of the different groups use it and they've all sequentially sort of lost it in large numbers.
Well, in that case, they have to find a new shell.
And so that's, going back to the kind of economics we were talking about beforehand, there's an economics involved in hermit crabs and houses.
So they fight over shells, but they sort of fight over shells, queue up to take other people's crab shells away.
So, you know, they need the shell because actually they're not crabs in a way that, you know, the true crabs are that you're probably more familiar with.
They're much closer related, I think, to squat lobsters and things like that.
And they've actually avoided, they've cheated, it's economics again, they've cheated from making a nice hard carapace of their own, which costs a lot of energy, by using the dead shell of a snail.
Right.
But in that case, they absolutely, if they're going to grow, they need a new shell to move into because they have a sort of slightly pathetically mineralised shell of their own and they won't last past their own predators.
So, yeah, it's a really important economic moment for a hermit crab.
Is the shell big enough to move into?
Showing 61–80 of 123 · page 4 of 7
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