Dental records

Tea and lemon drizzle cake in the sunshine beside a peaceful little bay presented no challenge to our dentition yet the rock surface around us bore these patterns made by tiny teeth of unrivalled strength.

 The radula of a limpet  is a sort of spiny tongue  with which the shellfish grazes on algae, leaving behind these rows of minute scape marks. In recent years it's been discovered that the substance of which limpet teeth are composed is the strongest biologically-formed material in the world, beating even spider silk.

The limpets themselves were hunkered down waiting for the tide to turn and night to come. Under the cover of darkness they will slide over the rocks and scrape, scrape, scrape at their single source of nutrition.

You might think this is a pointless lifestyle but limpets play an essential role in keeping the rocks free of excess algae. Pollution of the sea, such as the oil spill that occurred off the Pembrokeshire coast in 1996, caused enormous damage to marine wildlife and killed off all the limpets in many bays. Without the limpets, algae grew unchecked and the rocks turned green, releasing  larger amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. 
We need the limpets' tough teeth to keep our atmosphere in balance.


Photograph of a radula here.

How scientists are making a new super-hard sustainable material from the substance of which limpet teeth are formed here.

The sound of limpets scraping can be heard here (but be warned, it changes very rapidly from scrape music to actual rap music.) 

I'm sure everybody knows what limpets look like but if not they're here in an old blip.