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- Culture consists of the social behaviour and norms in human societies transmitted through social learning. Molluscs play a variety of roles in culture, including but not limited to art and literature, with both practical interactions—whether useful or harmful—and symbolic uses. Practical interactions with molluscs range from their use as food, where species as diverse as snails and squid are eaten in many countries, to the employment of molluscs as shell money and to make dyestuffs and musical instruments, for personal adornment with seashells, pearls, or mother-of-pearl, as items to be collected, as fictionalised sea monsters, and as raw materials for craft items such as Sailor's Valentines. Some bivalves are used as bioindicators to monitor the health of marine and freshwater environments. Harmful interactions with molluscs include the stings of cone snails and the venomous bites of certain octopuses; blue-ringed octopuses bite only when provoked, but their venom kills a quarter of the people bitten. Some snails are vectors of diseases such as schistosomiasis, a major tropical disease that infects some 200 million people; others are serious crop pests, and species such as the giant East African snail Lissachatina fulica have damaged ecosystems in areas where they have been introduced. Mollusc shells have been widely used in art, whether carved directly, sometimes as cameos, or depicted in paintings.In popular culture, the snail is known for its stereotypical slowness, while the octopus and giant squid have featured in literature since classical times as monsters of the deep. Many-headed and tentacled monsters appear as the Gorgon and the Medusa of Greek mythology, and the kraken of Nordic legend. The taxonomist Carl Linnaeus named the Venus shell as Venus dione, for the goddess of love and her mother, and named its parts using overtly sexual descriptors. (en)
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