A Review of Civilization and the Limpet by Martin Wells (Perseus Books)

Do you know the link between the sexual habits of the Slipper Limpet and a Roman aqueduct? Or why they are sufficiently remarkable to be commemorated in its specific name (Crepidula fornicata)? Have you ever wondered how ordinary limpets find their way home after a busy day cleaning algae off the rocks? Do you know the best way to catch an octopus? Or why whales don’t get the bends? The answers to these and many other intriguing questions can be found in this engagingly haphazard collection of essays.

The author, Martin Wells, is a marine biologist, an expert on cephalopods, and a yachtsman. He originally conceived the book as a journal of a voyage, but his enthusiasm for his subject has led him astray, and we may be grateful for that. Life is, after all, what happens to you while you are making other plans. Each essay is based on some aspect of the life of an animal in the sea, but they develop fugue-like to encompass observations on Life, the Universe and even, as the title promises, on Civilization. The tone is set, and his philosophy of life begins to beguile, on the very first page of his preface, when he remarks that “some poor people work for all their lives, and all they ever make is money”.

He develops his discussion on the navigational powers of the limpet, through a discursion on the perceptual powers of octopuses in two and three dimensions, to explain how these are affected by their lack of bones, and joints. And thence to the ability of vertebrates to build cars, and computers, and bash the ozone layer! In a similar vein, a chapter begins with an uncle who was interested in lug-worms, and defecation, and develops into a discussion of biological clocks and free will. A comment on the sheltered life led by physicists, and its limiting effect on their powers of imagination, leads via the effects of entropy (and how to contain them using a can of WD-40), to your chances of surviving the next mass extinction.

Wells’s own speciality gets its fair share of the action, too, with accounts of the swimming and depth control abilities of the squids, and the locomotive and reproductive adaptations of the Nautilus, and its ability to tolerate low oxygen levels, and how this may be relevant to the success of ammonites in the remote past. In a final chapter “Does science have to be useful”, he mounts a spirited attack on the utilitarian orthodoxy of our time, asserting the claim of science (like the arts) to be supported not least because it amuses, entertains and enriches our lives. Along the way he claims that biologists are more realistic than “hard” scientists in their judgements because they are used to dealing with the messiness of the natural world. I think that physicists working as meteorologists, among others, may wish to disagree with that!

My only complaint is that there are no illustrations to add further spice to this rich mixture. If you need an antidote to the world of targets, objectives, milestones and deliverables, I heartily recommend this book. A scientist who is willing to say that his studies of Nautilus give him an excuse ‘to swan off to the Pacific, and there spend a quite unnecessary proportion of my time underwater’ should be cherished, for this is not politically correct, and they may become an endangered species. Read this and recapture the pleasure of mucking about in rock pools, just for fun. But spare a thought for the limpet, because “a limpet has nothing, or next to nothing, to fantasize about”.

John Shepherd