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Gastropod

Common Limpet

Patella vulgata

Patella vulgata Linnaeus, 1758 · Patellidae WoRMS 140685

Reference photos

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A plain greyish white cone, up to about 6 cm long, with coarse ridges radiating out from an apex set centrally or a little forward. It clamps down hard on the rock, and grazes algae and micro-organisms when the tide is in or the shore stays damp, then creeps back to its own home scar, a depression its shell has worn into the rock and fits tightly. Shells are taller high on the shore, and flatter low down and on wave-beaten rock.

Depth

Intertidal, from the high shore down to the sublittoral fringe

Size

Shell up to 6 cm long, 5 cm wide and 3 cm high

Habitat

Rocks, stones and rock pools on rocky shores of every degree of wave exposure, from the high shore to the sublittoral fringe, and into estuaries

Behaviour

Creeps over the rock grazing algae when the tide is in or the shore is damp, then returns to a home scar its own shell has worn

Diet

I eat

  • A wide range of micro-organisms and algae, grazed straight off the rock
  • Wrack germlings and other young seaweed sporelings, cropped before they can establish
  • Encrusting red algae, and the film of diatoms on the rock surface

Eats me

Where you'd find it

Found around most of Britain and Ireland, though less often in the Celtic Sea and the waters west of Ireland.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenNow and thenWhere PEBL filmsBased on marine survey records (OBIS). Blank seas can mean nobody has looked there, not that the animal is absent.

Sources

Open-access references behind this page. Every statement on this page was read out of one of them; anything that could not be traced to a source was taken off the page rather than left standing. Each link was checked on the date shown, and confirmed then to be about this species.

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