QUEEN CONCH SHELLS

On eBay Queen Conch shells are going for about US $20 apiece, but around here they're so numerous that visitors pick up only the prettiest. You can see one use a neighbor has for his Queen Conches below:

He's placed dozens and dozens atop fence posts around his property. Other people use them to define driveways and walkways around their homes. By the way, "Propiedad Privada" means "Private Property." A shell of Queen Conch, STROMBUS GIGAS, appears in my hand below:

Is the word "conch" pronounced the way it looks, or like "conk"? I read that originally the word was pronounced "conk" but so many people over the years began mispronouncing it based on the way it looked that now the mispronunciation is usually accepted in dictionaries.

Queen Conches are big snails, and they're having a problem, less because people collect their shells than that people eat them. A NOAA news release in 2003 reported that Queen Conch populations in Honduras, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are exploited at rates that may be unsustainable. Also it says that the US imports approximately 80% of world trade in them, usually more than 1,000 metric tons of Queen Conch meat a year. You can read the whole release here.

Marcia confirms that Queen Conch populations just offshore here are suffering. She says that they come into shallow water when the water is warmest, in July and August, to mate. In the past they were common but now they're so rare that they have a hard time finding one another. Despite having read that you're not supposed to handle them, Marcia is convinced that she sees a bigger problem than being handled, so when they start coming into shallow water she collects them and leaves them in small groups so they can find one another and mate. Local fishermen gather them to eat, making no effort to leave breeding stock. They stab knives into them, pry out the flesh, and leave the shells dumped on the beach -- untold numbers of them. Finding enough bleaching shells to adorn your fence posts is no big problem.

Of course such unlimited hunting is illegal, but so are a lot of things that get done here very much in the open.