Why do limpets stick to rocks

This area of the limpet is commonly a light yellow or cream colour, with a muddy brown colour in the centre. Limpets are anything but limp! In fact, they are quite strong. They attach to rocks by using the muscle on the underside of their shell, often called their foot. A good way to really look at it is to think about the foot as a really large suction cup. While they typically only grow to about 6cm or 2.

The foot that clamps down onto the rocks is ridiculously strong as it needs to hold the limpet to the rock securely. This clamping process is usually so strong that imprints are left on the rock bases. Limpets generally stay in one place, securely, during low tide. Typically, they only move about 1m from their home base imprint and only do so to feed of algae that have grown on the rocks.

This bubble keeps the creature hydrated and prevents them from drying out when the tide is low and they are exposed to the above water elements. This is truly important as it keeps them healthy and actively ready for high tide again for feeding. Their ability to stay on the rocks with such force is also considered important for the ecosystem. The rocks they cling to usually have other water dwellers, like larvae, that require bare rocks to settle on.

If these rocks contain too many algae, the larvae cannot attach to the rocks and this greatly affects them. Even though limpets play an important role in rock ecosystems, they are still removed from rocks and in some cases, eaten. With such a strong foot attaching the limpets to the rock, they can be nearly impossible to remove. The sheer suction between the rock and the foot is simply astronomical. To remove a limpet from a rock, having a flat stone is ideal. The flat stone, when struck just right, will dislodge the shell from the rock.

Striking the limpet with the flat stone should be a quick and forceful motion. Beyond them, where the sea had retreated, my boots sank into drifts of unseasonable, fresh-laid sand, soft and fluffy as snow, writes Michael Viney. On a shore so open to ocean swells and breakers, the tidal surge in winter is more usually chaotic, its final limits blurred by heavy surf.

But for days and wondrous, starry nights the quiet lap of the furthest wavelet, the slow swirl of the last few bubbles in the dark, was remembered in a lacy, scalloped edge along the strand.

Each of these was further hemmed with sea-shells, heaped together like leaves. A less quiescent sea would have pounded them to fragments as the raw material of sand, but here they had been lifted, tumbled, hustled gently shorewards: drifts of limpets, mounds of mussels or rather, the glazed and vacant grottoes of their lives.

To look closely at any square foot of jumbled limpet shells, their porcelain interiors turned up to the sun, is to marvel at the subtle variation that selection brings about in one simple, functional design. The half-dozen limpet species that stick around our rocky shores all live in conical, toughly-ribbed shells, proof against the sea's hammer-blows. Even the beautiful and fragile-seeming blue-rayed limpet, Patina pellucida, translucent as a fingernail, clings to kelp in the same basic form.

The limpet cone is asymmetrical, its apex often tilted like a Kentish hop-kiln and highest towards the head of the snail crouched within. According to position on the shore and exposure to the wave, it may be flattened, or drawn up into a pointed "Chinaman's hat" with sharply fluted ribs.

Colours change, too: oranges, greens, ivory whites and rims of tortoiseshell. Least glamorous, perhaps, are the big, blunt-headed shells of the common limpet, Patella vulgata that monopolise the higher reaches of the rocks.

This is the bairneach, long considered the lowliest of desperate peasant foods yet, as Seamas Mac an Iomaire remarks in The Shores of Connemara: "Don't mind them, a batch of limpets is a sweet healthy food beside the hearth on a cold spring afternoon when one is hungry". No shore animal, it seems, has excited greater interest from science.

Its shell is clearly storm-proof, and its secure adhesion to the rock can be tested by the slightest tap of warning. The grip is not, as I once thought, achieved solely by suction, but also by an adhesive produced on the sole of the animal's foot. As long ago as the 18th century, an entomologist hung weights from limpets stuck to the underside of a rock and found that it took one of 30 lbs to break their hold.

But, looking at a limpet left high and dry on seemingly bare rock, how do they feed and on what? Neither your address nor the recipient's address will be used for any other purpose. The information you enter will appear in your e-mail message and is not retained by Phys. You can unsubscribe at any time and we'll never share your details to third parties.

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More information: Victor Kang et al. Molecular insights into the powerful mucus-based adhesion of limpets Patella vulgata L. DOI: This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only. Global consensus needed to develop climate risk disclosures for companies 19 minutes ago.

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