I was recently shown a photograph of something from a local beach that I hadn’t noticed before. It resembled a giant honeycomb growing over a mussel-covered rock. The thing was a colony of Sabellaria alveolata, the honeycomb worm. The individual worms are only about four centimetres long, but each builds a […]
There was much discussion in the pub last week about the weather, as usual, particularly the flooding in Co. Wexford. Some suggested that pearl mussels and slugs were to blame, a view also expressed in the newspapers by an Enniscorthy town councillor, though he talked about “pearls and snails”. So […]


