Suzanne Williams

speaker

225 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Suzanne Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

And then she put a tent around it.

Yes.

Yes, she just put a little strap over it.

He was quite happy.

He was just velcroing it so he couldn't walk away.

Then you put a tent around and then you showed it a computer screen with a dot that got bigger and bigger and had a camera above to film its behaviour.

And then what happened is as the dot gets bigger, at some point it can see it and it starts responding to it.

It stops feeding, first of all.

Then it partially withdraws its proboscis and its eye stalk.

And then it withdraws them entirely.

And you can work out from the video the times those happen and from the program how big the circle was.

And then you can work out how well they can see.

And it turns out these particular ones see really, really well.

They can see as well as rats and better than worker bees.

And we think part of the reason is because they've evolved a really unusual operculum.

which is the little door that closes behind them.

But they use it like a walking stick in this group and they can move along in a really jerky jumping motion.

This is a really amazing story.

So Tyrian purple is a pigment that comes from snails from the family Muricidae, and it's named after the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre, where it was produced on industrial scale, although it actually originated much early in Minoan civilizations.

It was mostly harvested from three species in the Mediterranean, from Hexaplex trunculus, Bolinus brandaris, and Stramonita haemostoma.

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