Mollusks have lived on Earth for more than 500 million years, and their shells (shells) have been involved in human life since the Paleolithic Age, such as: as a symbol of the faith, sex and power of the ancestors, a currency worth more than gold; as the shell withdrew from the monetary system, its influence in human life is still everywhere, such as global cuisine, ornaments, collectibles, exquisite fabrics, etc.; their shapes inspire the works of mathematicians, artists, and architects; to this day, People have found their great value in medicine, such as extracting new drugs to treat diabetes, non-addictive painkillers to replace morphine, etc.
Xinmin said that the new book "The Spiral of Time" tells an interesting story of the intertwining of shells and human civilization. The whole book takes the shell as the starting point and outlines the traces of the shell in the history of human civilization for thousands of years.
Myths and legends
"If you don't bring a shell, don't go anywhere." This is the famous saying of the demigod Triton.com. Triton was a mermaid in Greek mythology, with a human upper body and a fish on the lower body, so it is not a completely incarnated and successful god. Nevertheless, when Terry went out to patrol the sea, he would play his trumpet with all his might, which was based on the shell of a large conch, the top of which was cut off a little. When he blows this conch, he will make a deafening whistling sound, enough to scare away the sea monster and command the sea. Triton's father was Poseidon, the god of the sea, and his mother was Amphitrite, the god Queen. Compared with his famous parents, Terry Tong was slightly less famous, and his brilliance was even overshadowed by other gods in the family. Poseidon, the god of the sea, was the father of this extended family, and his descendants had a variety of gods: for example, one of them was a cyclops who could eat people, a monster that could stir up a whirlpool and devour the island, a stallion that could speak human language, and a fairy who could manipulate monstrous waves,a fairy who later married a giant with a thousand hands and fifty heads.
Triton, a demigod who uses the conch as a magic weapon, may not have as cool a mana as his siblings, but he is also a difficult character to provoke. Legend has it that Misenus, a mortal from the city of Troy, considered himself a remarkable genius trumpeter, and he rashly challenged Terryton to have a musical contest with him. Terry, enraged by Mishnus's boasting, pushed him into the sea and drowned. From this point of view, Terry Tong was still quite concerned about his conch magic weapon.
In addition to appearing in myths and stories, shells also hold a lofty place in the human world. In prehistoric times, humans have discovered shells, they picked them up and studied them carefully, admired their beautiful shapes, speculated about their mysterious marine homeland, and regarded them as treasures. For centuries, the melodious sound of Dharma snails has reverberated among the peaks of the Himalayas, calling on a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks to participate in prayer. Conchs from the Indian Ocean were taken hundreds of miles inland and intricately carved, adorned with a variety of gemstones, gold and colorful ribbons. The monks stood on the roof of the temple and blew their conch toward the sky to fight the coming storm and drive away all kinds of demons.
Decoration chaos
Regrettably, in modern times, people have lost their reverence for shells. Glory gradually became a thing of the past, and shells were reduced to inferior crafts. When I typed the keywords "sea shell" and "figurine" in the search engine, a series of inferior crafts appeared on the computer screen, and one of the villain shell sculptures has been lingering in my mind. The body of this little person is a larger yellow snail, and the head is also a yellow snail, but the body is small, and its narrow shell mouth makes it look like it is smiling. The villain also has a hat made of cockle shells glued to the top of his head. The little man's arms and legs are made of four spiral tower-like shells that stretch out at strange angles; the little man's mount is an elephant made of starfish, the starfish's brachiopods serve as raised trunks, and the elephant ears are made of clam shells (presumably starfish would like to turn itself into an elephant too). Another inferior craft is some pottery villains, but their price is not low. These pottery figures wear a jumble of shells on their heads, strings of pearls, rugged antler-like corals and seahorses made of shiny rhinestones. These little people are like mermaids who unfortunately fell into Poseidon's treasure chest, and after they got up in a panic, they picked up the treasures around them as clothes.
I saw more shell crafts in an unexpected place. It was the Natural History Museum in London, where I was invited to visit the basement. The museum houses a wide variety of shells, with millions of specimens, all sorted and neatly arranged in cupboards. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a transparent glass cabinet filled with all sorts of stranger objects. The museum's curator calls it a "horrible cabinet" that contains shell objects they've collected over the years, ranging from real shells to plastic replicas.
Among these objects, I also saw a sailboat ornament, the sails of which were made of scallop shells and the hull of the ship was a conch in the shape of a telephone, which vividly illustrated the saying "want to whisper to you" (in the Victorian era, the shape of the human ear was found to be spiral-shaped, like a shell). There was also a small piano covered in shells and a pile of yellow snails in the cupboard. The yellow snails are embedded with a pair of plastic eyes and gold wire glasses, which look like they have to learn turtles. I suppose that there is nothing wrong with giving The Yellow Snail a pair of rolling eyes, but it is a far cry from the tradition of human beings who used to treat shells as funerary objects for the dead as a sign of respect and mourning. I'm not saying to get people to put shells back in graves, I just think it's funny to make such a change.
Even if the shells were not carved into terrifying props to ward off evil spirits, they gained a certain reputation, becoming a symbol of the cheesy and clichéd beaches and a souvenir of all seafaring things. Today, because of the widespread use of the Internet, people living in cities will not be surprised to see herringbone drags or shell necklaces studded with yellow snails, or lampshades made of oyster shells. But most people don't know where these things came from, much less are they taken from living animals.
Modern contributions
In the hectic city life, people occasionally stop and think about shells for a moment. On vacation by the sea, we picked them up from the beach, felt the beauty of holding them in our hands, and put them in our ears to hear if there was really a sound of waves trapped inside. We take them home and place them on a bookshelf or in the bathroom to remind us not to forget the good times we had at the sea and to establish a subtle connection to the sea. It can be said that the shell can be both an elegant ornament or a small treasure we find by the sea, and it will also quietly lead us to think about some questions: Where did the shell come from? What carved them? How are they made? Perhaps even more interesting is why they are what they are today.
This book will answer the above questions and tell some of the more interesting things. I hope to get rid of the impression that shells are just small ornaments and return to where they should be: as a symbol of glory, it can tell people a lot of information. I will tell the reader how shells allow us to observe the thoughts of our ancient ancestors, how to appreciate beauty, how beauty is formed, and curiosity about life on Earth. In addition, I will record the stories of people who have dedicated their lives to the shell, and it is their efforts that make the shell so fascinating. I also put mollusks back into their shells and reveal their extraordinary journey through shelling.
Take, for example, giant triton, the famous shell named after the Greek demigod Triton, who was often used to make trumpets. From time to time, one can see the Dafa snail dragging huge shells and wandering around the coral reefs of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The shell of the Dafa snail is engraved with beautiful, narrow markings, like a polished tortoise shell, which is larger than the trumpet; it can be said that the shell of the Dafa snail is the largest and most beautiful shell. From the mouth of the shell, the dafa snail will protrude from the mouth of the shell with a strong single foot covered with brown spots, as well as a pair of tentacles decorated with dazzling black and yellow stripes and a pair of small eyes. The tentacles of the Dafa snail are very sensitive and can quickly detect the breath of a dangerous animal in the water, the crown of thorn starfish.
The body of the crown of thorn starfish is as large as a wheel, and its body is covered with poisonous thorns. They will climb above the coral reef, spew stomach bags from their mouths, wrap up the hapless prey underneath their bodies, and finally slowly digest them. These starfish are terrible sea beasts, and their natural enemy is the Dafa snail. If you put starfish into an aquarium and pour freshly soaked seawater into the tank, the usually calm starfish will immediately realize the threat, and then try their best to climb out of the aquarium and then frantically escape. In the wild, Dafa snails hunt for crown-of-thorn starfish, and starfish's poisonous spines do not work for them at all. The Dafa snail wraps its huge feet around the starfish, then bites a hole in its hard skin and injects saliva into it to paralyze it. Next, it's time for Dafa snails to eat.
Dafa snails are particularly fond of eating starfish that feed on polyps, so they can play an important role in maintaining the healthy functioning of coral reef ecosystems. Australia's Great Barrier Reef has seen the proliferation of crown-of-thorn starfish in droves, and its momentum has been like a plague outbreak, which has been blamed on the decline in the number of dafa snails – shell enthusiasts and trumpet makers have taken too many conchs. In general, if there is no Dafa snail, the starfish will multiply in large numbers and then crawl across the coral reef in groups, leaving only a piece of ruin in the place where it passes. What is certain is that the proliferation of starfish will have a serious impact on the coral reef biota, leaving the otherwise vibrant, colorful coral reef community dull and dull, leaving only the white and miserable skeleton. In the past, in order to kill starfish, people used to fish them up and chop them into pieces and throw them back into the sea. However, these rescue actions have had little effect. What's even more embarrassing is that after a while, it was found that those starfish fragments could grow back into a complete starfish, so the previous move instead pushed the starfish to reproduce. So far, though, it's still uncertain whether the outbreak of the starfish plague really stemmed from a reduction in Dafa snails.
It takes a week for dafa snails to fully digest a single starfish, so it will take a lot of dafa snails to control these reef destroyers. However, if people know how Dafa snails frighten starfish, they can be prevented from gathering, thereby reducing their chances of mating and reproduction. The large-scale reproduction of crown-of-thorn starfish is likely to be a natural phenomenon, but it does cause a lot of trouble for coral reef communities. Coral reefs protect coastlines from storms, waves, rising sea levels, and provide safety and food for millions of people, but today they face many deadly threats, the most serious of which is climate change. These important habitats must function benignly to cope with the enormous pressures of the modern world, and dafa snails, which like to wander around the seabed, can make a huge contribution in this regard.
As we will discuss later, shells and the mollusks that make them have played an important role in the human world: they provide food for humans, create habitats for other animals, and inspire new drugs. Looking at the world, wherever these shell makers are absent, it will cause huge problems for the local ecosystem that is difficult to repair.
The Dafa snail and other mollusks die or leave behind an empty shell. These shells vary in size, color and form. They are often named after similarly imaged objects, such as: sun snail, moon snail, cavitation snail, hat shell, head puff shell, crown shell and helmet shell. Some shells resemble vases, some resemble unicorn horns, some resemble strawberries or sundae ice cream, and some resemble coffee beans. When you see a crimson Oxheart Clam, it's easy to have the illusion that "it's going to beat." There is also a seagull clam known as the "wings of angels", whose shell lines are clear and delicate enough to convince atheists that the messengers of heaven have really come to Earth. While most of the shells are in one hand, many are smaller than pins, while others are surprisingly large, as wide as a human with outstretched arms and weighing heavier than two newborn elephants.
To be precise, many shells are worth a long article, but the purpose of this book is not to tell you everything about shells, nor is it a booklet on how to find or distinguish shells (but I hope you will find a book on this). This book contains a number of shell stories that I have carefully selected, which together form an incredible picture of the strange, unforgettable and little-known stories of shells as they merge into the human world.
Mollusks have lived on Earth for more than 500 million years, and their shells (shells) have been involved in human life since the Paleolithic Age, for example: as a symbol of the faith, sex and power of the ancestors, a currency worth more than gold; as the shell withdraws from the monetary system, its influence in human life is still everywhere, such as global cuisine, ornaments, collectibles, exquisite fabrics, etc.; their shapes inspire the works of mathematicians, artists, and architects; to this day, People have found their great value in medicine, such as extracting new drugs to treat diabetes, non-addictive painkillers to replace morphine, etc.
Through these carefully selected stories, the authors provide us with a unique perspective on how to appreciate the wonders of life on Earth.