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

So the simplest one is just to crack the shell so that the preservative penetrates.

But that means the shell's destroyed.

So we want to keep the shell intact where possible because this is a really important character for us.

And so other methods are, there's a method that's thousands of years old that has been used for people when they're eating or shell collecting.

And the Japanese call it nikuniki, if I've pronounced it correctly.

You pour hot water on and you can actually unwind the snail from the shell and pull it out intact with your shell all intact.

But if people are thinking of collecting themselves, they need to remember that.

Check about permits because some dead shells in some places, you need permits to collect them.

You need permits to transport them between countries.

And there are some real dangers in collecting seashells, believe it or not.

Some seashells, as we've mentioned, the cone snails, are deadly venomous.

If these snails, some of them, the geography cone snail, eats fish in nature.

And if you think how slow a snail goes and how fast a fish goes, it has a harpoon that it fires at it.

And the toxin it has is so venomous and so fast-acting that the fish doesn't get any further away and the snail can go over and eat it.

That toxin, if you get stung by one of them, you don't have very long to live.

And the nickname in the Philippines for this is the cigarette fish because you have just enough time to smoke a cigarette before you die.

Another thing to really be careful of, especially if you're in Australia or places like that.

I grew up worrying about this.

My mum worried about this when I was a child.

Blue-ringed octopus.

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