Travel notes, shell guides, and local life from the Andaman coast. Profiles of our artisans and the rhythm of beach life, refreshed with the bay every morning.
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A speck noticed on a casual 2019 dive off Taiwan has been formally named Thecacera sesama — a sea slug under three millimetres long, the first new Thecacera described in nearly three decades, and named after the word divers themselves use: sesame.
New
On 3 October 2026, Chulalongkorn University researchers formally described two new limestone-karst snails — Siamochlamys isanensis and S. lannaensis — doubling their genus to five species, all found in Thailand and nowhere else on Earth.
Trinity College Dublin scientists have discovered that a discarded oyster shell can capture up to 1.5 grams of rare earth metals per gram of shell — locking wind-turbine and smartphone metals into stable crystals and turning seafood waste into a water-cleaning material.
At restaurants a hundred miles inland, shucked oyster shells are now riding back to the coast, curing in the sun for six months, and becoming homes for baby oysters — and a new 2026 review says old shells can even clean aquaculture water.
A new Scientific Reports study zapped 15 rare blue and green bivalve shells with laser light and found that ten green ones contain no detectable pigment at all — their colour may be pure light architecture, while blue shells recolour pigments from their dinner.
On the grey limestone of Montenegro's Durmitor mountains, citizen scientists have described two snails new to science — Cochlostoma komarnica and Cochlostoma dobrido — each carrying a tiny circular door that seals its shell shut.
A new PNAS study read 540 million years of mollusk history and found that nearly half of all major shell inventions appeared in the first 96 million years — then evolution switched to perfecting old ideas. Your shell collection is the proof.
Giant clams glow electric blue because they farm their own sunlight — millions of algae living inside their mantles. Two new studies, one from August 2026, reveal how much each species runs on solar power, and why that helps us protect the reef's gentle giants.
From queen conchs wearing sensor backpacks in Grand Cayman to an 18,000-year-old conch horn that still plays real notes, scientists are discovering that shells are among the ocean's most faithful record-keepers.
A Smithsonian oyster fused to a set of 1898 dentures is more than a curious museum object. It is a vivid shell story about how eastern oysters build reefs, clean water, and inspire one of the world’s largest restoration efforts.
The chambered nautilus is more than a beautiful spiral. It is a slow-growing deep-reef animal whose shell works like elegant natural engineering, recording a long life chamber by chamber.
A new Smithsonian display makes one deep-time lesson instantly vivid: some ammonite shells still flash rainbow color 69 to 72 million years after they formed. Here’s why those fossils glow, what they reveal about North America’s inland sea, and why shell lovers should care.
Pick up a shell on today’s shoreline and you are holding the long afterglow of one of Earth’s biggest turning points. A new Stanford-led study shows how the Great Dying 252 million years ago helped decide which shells would become the familiar stars of modern beaches.
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