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 […]

I often talk to cows; where I live, there isn’t much else to talk to. They can look so miserable, standing in muddy fields, soaked by the pouring rain and battered by the wind. But then, on a sunny day, chewing the cud, they seem quite content. They stare back at […]

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 […]

Last month, I mentioned a fish called a lumpsucker; some of you might not know exactly what it is. Cyclopterus lumpus is a strange creature that lives in the cooler waters of the north Atlantic. The Latin name can be translated as ‘lumpy circular wing’; which refers to its knobbly, […]

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