Things I Wish I'd Known

This picture fills me with shame and guilt. It’s our bathroom cabinet bought over three decades ago. But those shells weren’t collected by some strolling beachcomber who happened to find four matching ones that would go perfectly on my cabinet. What I know now is that those shells were stolen from the sea, and the animals inside them killed - just so I could have them in my bathroom.

Then there’s the time I saw someone carrying a “dead” sunstar (a starfish) off the beach. Up to that point I’d only ever seen a starfish with five legs and this had twelve. I admired it. What I know now is that that sunstar was probably still alive and the best place for it was back in the sea.

Or the time on holiday I brought a few absolutely tiny shells, empty of their original inhabitants, back to our hotel. The next morning, the minute hermit crabs that had been living in them were poking out, dead.

It was ignorance, not maliciousness, when I bought the cabinet, admired the sunstar and collected the shells. But I still had - and have - so much to learn about the delicate intricacies of our natural world.

In my last blog I said all you needed to be a beachcomber was to be curious, to keep questioning. As just one of nine million species on Earth, perhaps that’s what we need to be to be the best humans too, to be curious about the other 8.99999 million species that we share this planet with.