No longer just ‘famine food’ and the ‘fish of death’

The study shows that the earliest known evidence of limpets being consumed by humans dates back 164,000 years to a cave in South Africa.

They were subsequently eaten by civilisations including the ancient Greeks, Romans and Vikings, more recently featuring in the diets of Caribbean slaves and indigenous populations in Chile and British Columbia.

In modern times, they have been widely considered as ‘famine food’ – as captured in narratives from the Irish potato famines and Highland Clearances of Scotland – with people relying on them in the face of hunger and destitution.

They also played an important role in some of the most iconic episodes of the 20th century. Sir Ernest Shackleton wrote that limpets helped to sustain the crew of the Endurance when it became trapped in Antarctic ice, while limpet stew flavoured with curry powder became a staple dish for the people of Jersey during its German occupation during the Second World War.

In Hawai‘i, however, the limpet is called ‘the fish of death’ because many people lose their lives annually harvesting them from wave-exposed locations.

However, limpets’ importance to humans isn’t simply as a source of food as they have played a significant role in global culture, medicine and innovation.

They were used as tools to scrape the pigment used for prehistoric cave paintings, and for religious ceremonies everywhere from Wales and Ireland, to Tasmania and Hawai’i.

They are mentioned in works by writers from Aristophanes to Victor Hugo, C.S. Lewis to Robert Louis Stevenson, and William Golding to William Wordsworth.

In medicine, limpet proteins are increasingly being used as part of research into the treatment of bladder cancer, atopy and asthma, and autoimmune diseases such as Lupus.

They are also influencing research into next-generation technologies, with the ‘teeth’ of limpets known to be composed of goethite – the strongest material known in nature – and, as a result, resistant to abrasion.

And they feature in many place names particularly in Scotland and Ireland, but also in Hawai‘i, Singapore and Antarctica.

From an environmental perspective, the study says, limpets are the champion grazers of our coastlines and have been widely shown to have an important structuring function on rocky shores.