Woman's Hour - Parenting Podcast: Rock Pools

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Heading to the British coast on holiday this year? The fascinating Heather Buttivant tells us what wonders we can find in the common rock pool, and how to interest kids in them.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, this is Jane Garvey, and this Woman's Hour parenting podcast is all about rock pools. OK, it's not traditionally, specifically parenting, but on the other hand, you could be fortunate enough to be by the sea, and it's the British summer, so it might be raining, and what could be better than a trip down the rock pools? Here we go.

Heather Butterfont, author of Rock Pool, Extraordinary Encounters Between the Tides, A Lifelong Fascination Told in 24 Creatures. John, every single page of this book, there's a nugget that somebody will enjoy. And yes, we will talk about that fact about barnacles that I know you're desperate to bring to the nation. But we'll start with, there are great rock pools, presumably all over Britain,

but there must be parts of the British coastline that are the best for rock pools. Of course, I am massively biased. I grew up in Cornwall and I still live in Cornwall. So of course, I'm going to say Cornwall because we have rocky shores all around the edge in Cornwall and I still live in Cornwall so of course I'm going to say Cornwall because we have obviously rocky shores all around the edge of Cornwall, Devon as well a lot of Wales is rocky Scotland's amazing so many places, Yorkshire all those rocky coasts of course

places you have rocks are great for rock pools really any rock pool you never know what you might find you can go to the most unpromising looking place you might find. You can go to the most unpromising-looking place, you might find something. Of course, around the south-east, particularly the east coast, where you have very long, sandy or muddy beaches.

They're not so great for rock pools, but they're still brilliant for beachcombing. And if you go paddling in the sea, you can see all sorts of things there as well. And anywhere with sea. Let's start with the limpet, which is something that we're all aware of. there as well. So anywhere we'd see. Let's start with the limpet, which is something that we're all aware of. But what is it?

Because they're much more interesting than we might have been led to believe. Of course. I think we just assume limpets don't do anything. They're almost part of the rock. They look like they are. So these are these cone-shaped shells

and they live attached to the rock. What we see is them when they're resting they're out of the water the tide's gone out and we see them on the rock so obviously they're not going anywhere at that point because like any sea creature they don't want to dry out the sun and the wind are their worst enemy and they're very exposed to it up on those rocks um but as soon as the tide comes in the little limpet takes on a whole new life of course it needs to go off and feed and and see its friends so it sets off across the rock and it munches on the the little tiny algae the seaweeds that live on on the rocks and it basically scours

the whole rock clean and the amazing thing about the limpet is that it it doesn't just it doesn't just have little teeth to do this it has something called a radula which is like a thick like a tongue but with a sore edge um and it has that fringed with a material called gophite which is the strongest biological material known to man and as it scours off the seaweed it actually chips off bits of rock so if you go down to the beach when the tide has maybe uh just gone out and the limpets are heading home after they're feeding put your ear close to the rock where the limpets are and you can sometimes hear them munching on the seaweed because what you can hear is actually the rock being chipped off and they gouge out a little trail along the rock, a zigzag trail that you can see if you have slate or a

soft rock, you can see this trail where the limpet's been. So they are quite incredible. That is just remarkable. And I'm sorry to introduce the subject of cannibalism, but crabs, they're not immune to a bit of that. Yeah, especially our most common crab. So the shore crab, if you've ever been crabbing or looking in the rock pools, the crab that you're most likely to have found is this little crab that when it's grown up, it's got a green colour, but when they're babies, they come in every possible colour.

And the green shore crab is a master of survival. It's a fabulous one. You know, if you take the kids down to the shore to understand how these creatures live, because they can survive right near the top of the shore where they've got pools that warm up in the sun and get frozen in the winter. They can survive if the water is very salty where it's evaporated out. They can survive if there's a river coming through it. They can live up in estuaries. They're amazing things. And being good at survival anyone who's ever read a bear grills

book you know it's full of how to eat everything that you can get your hands on and that's what the crabs do prawns are similar as well they can eat just anything well including each other each other oh dear okay including each other particularly um the crabs. So that's why we always say if you do go to the beach and you're catching crabs, only have ideally just one at a time in your bucket with plenty of water so that it's comfortable. Because as soon as you've got more than one in there, they will start to fight and they may actually eat each other. Okay. I meant they're not averse to a bit of cannibalism. I've just realised I said something else. So I just corrected myself before we get emails.

Where else should we go? Starfish are just, when you see a starfish on a beach, I think it's just one of life's they are miraculous little things, aren't they? What are they all about? Starfish are, I think they're normally

top of the list. If I take groups, whether it's adults or children out on the beach, starfish are top of the list of things take groups whether it's adults or children out on the beach starfish are top of the list of things that people would love to see and people often haven't ever seen a real one in real life um because you do need to go a bit further down the shore and look more carefully to find them but we have lots of species of starfish in our rock pools around the uk and they are amazing creatures of course and they're they're very beautiful and we love starfish because they're beautiful um what children really like about starfish isn't so much their beauty but

their weird their weird ways of living um so starfish uh quite easily lose an arm if they get in a fight or they they have an encounter with the predator they quite often will lose an arm or two arms or three arms even four or five arms and that's not a big problem to a starfish if they've lost a couple of arms they simply grow them back again which is quite special in fact the crabs can do it as well they can very slowly grow grow limbs back and the remarkable thing about starfish as well as is if that arm that's been severed has a bit of the central disc left on it, it may regrow into a whole new starfish. Again, I mean, I could listen to this stuff all day, but now comes possibly the epitome of what's passed for my career. Tell me about a barnacle's penis, Heather.

Everybody wants to know this. Trust me, they want to know behind the glass. They're gawping at it. Just take it back to the beginning. Barnacles are little creatures, little shelled creatures that live on the rocks. They often completely cover the rocks. If you've been walking on the rocks at low tide,

you'll often find they're sharp and they hurt your feet, or if you fall, they scratch your hands. So those little creatures, and like the limpet, they don't seem to do very much because they're just and they hurt your feet or if you fall they scratch your hands so those little creatures and like the limpet they don't seem to do very much because they're just stuck there aren't they we only really discovered that barnacles were crustaceans and related to crabs

and prawns and things when people started looking down microscopes because when they're tiny babies the barnacles swim around in the plankton so they've got little legs and they're tiny babies the barnacles swim around in the plankton okay so they've got little legs and they swim all over the place it's only when they're ready to become adults that they settle down and the little barnacle swims down headfirst onto the rock and glue cements its its head the back of its neck onto the rock with its legs in the air and then

it grows the shell that we use to around itself for protection. It's got a little door at the top and it just opens that, pops its legs out to feed when the tide comes in and grabs little bits of plankton going past. All good up to there. And obviously you can have hundreds and hundreds of barnacles. You've only got about 30 seconds. Yeah.

So the barnacle needs to fertilise other barnacles in the area, but it can't move. It can't go anywhere. So it has to have an enormously long appendage, which it uses. You can say penis, it's woman's hour. It sends out fishes. It fishes into other barnacles. Like a lucky dip, really. Like a lucky dip, yes. The key fact is, if a barnacle were human, and it isn't, if it were a six-foot-tall man, and it's not, its penis would be about 48 foot long, correct? That's right.

It depends on the individual barnacles. They're not all equal. They actually have, very often, an extendable penis. It's like a telescopic penis that comes out. When they're finished, it takes a lot of energy. So once they've finished with that and they've done fertilising other barnacles, they will drop their penis.

They no longer need it. And they actually will have been fertilised by their fellow barnacles around them. They're male and female at the same time. So then they breed their own eggs and they go off into the plankton. Heather, that was brilliant. Thank you very much indeed. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was

somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in.

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