Synthetic clothing, skin exfoliants and toothpaste may not sound too toxic, but to a lugworm or filter-feeding mussel they are lethal poison.

Wind and tide shift the resultant silt across the surface of the bay, where shellfish, shrimps and lugworm feed hosts of wading birds.

The worst part of this performance was digging the bait of lugworms on the little beach of Creviçhon.

The worm in the photo is one of 17,590 annelid species: others include earthworms, lugworms and leeches.