A Bloody surprise

On a pleasantly warm day in August 1977 I found myself at Ilfracombe, a watering place on the north coast of Devonshire popular with holidaymakers. I had arrived there, hoping to satisfy a long-cherished ambition, to visit Barricane, situated some four miles to the south west, at one end of the long curved shore known as Woolacombe Sands. I had read about the delights of Barricane and its beach in a book written by the distinguished author of popular books on natural history, Philip Henry Gosse, well known for his ground-breaking studies of sea anemones, perhaps better known for his fierce opposition to Darwin’s ideas on evolution.

Gosse visited Barricane in 1852 and described what he saw in A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, published the following year. ‘Its peculiarity’, he said, ‘is that it has a beach entirely composed of shells, some of which are rare, or at least are not found anywhere else in this vicinity.’ That statement had enticed me there, 125 years later. The ‘peculiarity’ of this beach was an open secret. Gosse mentioned some of its interesting species, but made it clear he was not satisfied with their empty shells alone. ‘I wished to procure some of these species in a living state’, he said, ‘and hoped that I might be able to find them about the rocks at extreme low water, as it was now spring-tide. Therefore, leaving the shell-collectors, I strolled down the long narrow inlet, of which the shell-beach was the head, towards the tide-pools at the water’s edge.’ Wanting to examine some of the deep pools closely, he ‘stripped and jumped in, the weather being warm’. Unfortunately, it was all to no avail. ‘I could find not a single individual of any of the rarer species of shells alive’, he said, although he did discover some sea slugs ‘of exquisite beauty’.

As I stepped onto the beach at Barricane I recognised it from Gosse’s description. Shell collectors there were none, but shells there were in plenty. In a few minutes I made a substantial collection of them, many imperfect, none rare. They gave me some satisfaction, but, like Gosse, I was more interested in the living creatures and began searching tide pools for their occupants, as he did. Finding a large pool, I scoured its pellucid waters for living molluscs. I was about to pick up a brightly coloured winkle when I noticed something moving on the surface, something resembling a transparent torpedo. No more than three inches long, at a guess, it was a small squid, golden yellow and speckled with light-red dots.

Having never seen a squid in its natural habitat, I wanted to capture it, for the same reason Gosse would have wanted to capture it - to examine it more closely. Grabbing it in my right hand, I placed it on the back of my left. It clung fast, at the same time rapidly changing colour to a livid red. My reaction to this malevolent being, seemingly gorged with my blood, was to pull it off and hurl it from me. Anxiously I surveyed the back of my hand, looking for a nasty wound and a flow of blood. To my surprise and relief, I found neither. The squid, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. By changing colour, chameleon-like, it had fooled me and made its escape. Squids do that kind of thing all the time, but seldom, I should have thought, to escape the clutches of an inquisitive shell collector.

I cannot be sure of its identity, so brief and so traumatic was my acquaintance with it, but it may have been an example of Alloteuthis subulata, described by Lamarck in 1798. If Gosse had had a similar encounter with this small squid, when exploring the tide pools at Barricane in 1852, I doubt he have would been fooled by it as I was and would have watched it with calm detachment. I wonder, though, if he would have been tempted to make something more dramatic of it in A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devon Coast? Sea slugs, after all, may be ‘exquisitely beautiful’ but they are not very exciting.

Alloteuthis subulata Lamarck, 1798. Hand-coloured engraving by J. de C. Sowerby from Vol. 1 (pl. QQQ, fig. 1a) of A History of British Mollusca and their Shells by E. Forbes & S. Hanley (1848-53). This engraving (named Loligo media on the plate) was published within a year or two of Gosse’s 1852 visit to Barricane.