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 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 they mostly live in sediments.

They burrow or burrow into rocks.

Those two groups really account for most of your seashells you're going to find.

You might find, if you're very lucky...

Maybe a nautilus shell, which belongs to the class Cephalopoda, which includes octopus, squid and cuttlefish that don't have true shells.

The only one in that group that does is the nautilus, which is a small group of about six or seven species.

And they have a chambered shell that floats.

So although the species is found offshore in deep waters, the shells will occasionally wash up or get caught in fishermen's nets.

Then you have tusk shells, the scaphopods, scaphopoda.

These are little tiny ones that are shaped like horns and they're open at both ends and they're quite fragile, but you do see them sometimes washed up in large numbers.

There's the polyplacrophora, which are the chitons.

It is amazing.

One of the things that I think is really interesting is that we...

We think of colour as being something related to an object, but it's not an inherent property of an object.

And this is something that took me a long time to get my head around, but it's actually the interaction between an observer who has an image-forming eye and a brain capable of processing the data and light reflecting off an object.

So this leads to the really strange idea that we all call this red colour.

But we will never know exactly what someone else is seeing.

So the way we process data is unique to us.

And the same is true for animals.

So colors in the natural world either come from pigments, which are chemicals that either absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others.

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