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

But that doesn't always tell you if they see in color, but it can tell you if they don't see in color.

The best way is behavioral studies.

Yeah, mollusks have the most amazing diversity of eyes of any group in the animal kingdom, but chitons might be the weirdest.

So chitons are the little, they're a long oval shape.

They have eight interlocking flat plates and a strong muscular girdle that holds them together.

And they clamp down tight on rocks and they live mostly in the intertidal or shallow waters.

They have little networks of tunnels through their shells.

Then they have lots of sensory organs that pierce through these shells.

But some species actually have eyes in their shells.

So these sensory networks include eyes.

So the same material that is used to make the shell is used to make the eyes.

So some of the eyes actually rub off and abrade against rocks.

And they grow new ones as their shells grow.

And the new eyes are bigger than the old eyes.

Yes, our collections are really huge.

We have 8 million specimens and we still continue to collect.

And when we collect nowadays, it's often with the idea of having material that we can use for molecular studies.

So that means we need to collect the animal as well as the shell.

And we need to be able to preserve the animal.

So we anaesthetise the animal and then we use different methods.

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