Marine Gastropods

Archie Taplin

Trainee Community Engagement Officer

In the lead up to marine week, I joined the Marine Gastropods course led by Simon Taylor (Marine Recorder for the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland). It was an in-depth look at some of the strangest and most diverse residents of our shoreline: marine gastropods, molluscs that include sea slugs, topshells, limpets and whelks.

The day began in the classroom, with a crash course in taxonomy, morphology and some surprisingly shocking mollusc biology. Let’s just say, if your reproductive parts were located where some of these molluscs keep theirs, you’d think twice about joining the family FaceTime call. 

We explored ID techniques, etymology (like how nudibranch comes from nudi- meaning naked, and -branch meaning gill), and had a table of shelled specimens to check out and a flip through Mollusc World magazine, yes, that’s a thing!

Afterwards, we headed out with Simon and our new mollusc ID skills to examine the rocky shoreline at Rottingdean. With Simon and other coastal experts around to point out key features and answer every question, the rocky shoreline came alive with an incredible variety of species. Much like limpets, we found our way back to where we began, the classroom, to discuss our findings and wrap the day up. If Simon Taylor was Aladdin, his mollusc-filled mind was the magic carpet, which, of course, makes me Princess Jasmine. He showed me ‘a whole new world’ (of molluscs), one I’ll be seeing with much more appreciation next time I’m by the sea.

My favourite mollusc of the day was a Chiton we found (an oval shaped mollusc that’s somewhere between a sea slug and an Armadillo). I loved how prehistoric it looked with its cool armour plates.

With Marine Week kicking off, this course felt like the perfect appetiser for a fortnight of ocean-themed admiration and education. Highly recommended to anyone keen to boost their coastal ID skills and general marine knowledge and wonderment.