‘Is that nail varnish on your trousers?’ my mother exclaimed, as she fished my dirty jeans from the laundry basket when I returned from my first A-level biology field trip. Now, before you think I had some strange adolescent fetish (considering I’m male), there is a very good explanation for this. Periwinkles!
The location of this maiden voyage into the weird and wonderful world of rock pool study, and my new-found friend the periwinkle, was Swansea. I was conducting an investigation into the population size of these small creatures (see Box 1). There I was, standing on a Swansea rocky shore on a freezing cold morning, periwinkle in one hand and nail varnish in the other. I got more nail varnish on my clothes than I did on the periwinkles — and it was then that I knew I was ‘not a biologist’.
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