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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Seashells · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

Well, we've learned a huge amount because it's an amazing resource.

So you can imagine going in the field and braving the horrors that Susanna has just been talking about.

But, you know, it takes time and it takes money.

In museums, you are able to leverage huge amounts of effort that people have put in over sort of one, two centuries often.

So you have a vast sort of coverage of different sort of species, environments which have disappeared through sort of habitat destruction.

And my favourite thing these days is to look at historic collections.

We're very interested in the way the environment is changing because of human activity.

And it's very interesting, and some of my students have been involved in doing this, is actually looking at historic collections from the same locality where it's been collected and has gone into a museum maybe every decade for the last hundred plus years.

And you can then actually look to see if those shells have changed, how thick they are, how they grow, all sorts of things like that.

So it's a real way of sort of conducting an experiment,

but without having actually planned it.

So it's really, and you can't do that without museum collections.

Well, I'm afraid it's probably us.

So habitat destruction is happening all the way around the world for various reasons.

We have a very bad habit of transporting mollusks as larvae in the ballast water of ships and they go on little trips around the world with the ships and then are discharged into new environments.

And sometimes those mollusks just re-establish in those new habitats.

But, of course, the main thing that's worrying us at the moment is that we're worried about temperature increase and increased acidity of the seawater.

And if you lay down a shell made of calcium carbonate, at least the fear is that they may be dissolving very fast.

You mean their shells are dissolving?

And if we assume that they, as we do, as we believe that the shell is very important to them as armour, having expended a lot of energy to lay it down only to have it dissolve is pretty critical.

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