The Queen Conch’s Gambit – Mother Jones

Queen conchs, which can grow to the same size as a football, are prized for their meat, and shell.Lisa Collins/Blue Planet Archive

This story was originally published in Hakai Magazine and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As the blue-and white The skiff is cruising across the bay to Naguabo at the eastern tip of Puerto Rico. Gabriel Ramos, a fisherman from Puerto Rico, is the first to be in focus. He waves his arms in excitement and waving his arms. The closer the boat comes to shore, more details will emerge: dive tanks clanking within the hull, gaffs and catchers pulpo (octopus), spearguns for pargos (snappers). Only at the dock does the day’s haul become visible, in two buckets at the bottom of the boat. One is filled with slabs. carrucho—queen conch. Carrucho is a highly prized catch. Selling for $14 per pound, it’s the priciest item in the fish markets along El Malecón de Naguabo, the nearby waterfront promenade known for fresh seafood.

Today’s conch prize, however, is not the sliced white flesh heaped in the first bucket. Ramos is pumped into what looks like a lump of shelly, sand, and sealed in a sandwichbag. The second bucket holds the water. It’s a string of conch eggs.

Half a million eggs are laid by a mother queen conch in a gelatinous strand. It would be longer than a semi-truck trailer if it was not for her. She camouflages the strand by covering it with sand and then fusses it into neat piles that could be mistakenly called coral or shell. She will lay nine to ten million larval conchs each year, sending nearly five million into the ocean every year. Fewer than one percent will survive to grow into the Caribbean’s favorite marine snail, with the glossy pink shell and sweet meat eaten across the 26 countries in its range.

Queen conch shells can grow to as large as a football. Its handle-like cavity gives it a satisfying grip, but it weighs closer than a brick. That heft makes queen conchs easy to spot and catch—so easy that overharvesting for their meat and shells has collapsed populations throughout their habitat in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. The United States was first to lose its queens. These queens once thrived in the southern tip Florida.

They have not rebounded, despite Florida’s ban on commercial conch fishing since 1975 and all harvesting since 1986. The state ban on big sea snails led to the listing of the species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which was established to monitor and limit trade. The losses have only increased. Scientists have warned that the once-massive conch herds of The Bahamas—which exports nearly all the conch meat consumed in the United States—have now thinned below the minimum number needed for the animals to breed.

Scientists believe that it will take bold actions to save the species, including shrinking the harvest and protecting greater swathes the seagrass beds where conchs gather in herds for grazing and breeding. That is no less true in Puerto Rico, where the animals are in decline but slightly better protected than in The Bahamas—with a closed season each summer to allow the conchs to reproduce. Ramos is a key piece missing in the conservation puzzle. He gives the fishers a serious part in recovery efforts and compensates them for their work as any other expert.

Ramos is one of the 800 Puerto Rican fishers who dive for carrucho as their main source of income. Ramos is part of a new reciprocal model where he gets more money for collecting eggs than he does from harvesting conch. Scuba diving over a patch of seagrass this morning in about 15 meters of water, Ramos grabbed a live queen conch—destined for market until he saw that it was a breeding mother. A sandy egg pile lay beneath her shell. Ramos decided to not slicing the carrucho meat using his knife. Instead, Ramos snipped a quarter of the egg mass from his fingers and slipped it into a sandwich bag. He then returned the conch to her sea-bottom brood.

Ramos still in his wetsuit is seen at the dock and hands Ramos the bucket with the conch egg as if it were a donation organ on the way to a transplant. Raimundo Espinoza, a conservation biologist, grabs the bucket and takes it to an aging dockside building. The complex, which is two stories high, is home the Naguabo Fishing Association. It is one among 40 public-private fishing cooperatives in Puerto Rico. They support their members by purchasing and marketing their seafood. Naguabo’s is one of the island’s oldest fishing co-ops, founded more than half a century ago by the grandfathers of some of the fishermen who belong to it today.

Parts of the complex and dock are oddly twisted or missing—reminders of Hurricane Maria’s direct hit in 2017 and the risk of future storms. Members of the association have created a hatchery in response to Hurricane Maria, which they have set up as a place for queen conchs to grow.

Half indoor lab and half open-air courtyard, Naguabo Queen Conch Hatchery buzzes in an organized network of pipes and filters. There are deep tanks and shallow basins, carboys and beakers full of algae, and there are also deep tanks and shallower ones. Ramos, Espinoza, and Megan Davis, an oceanographic institute marine research professor at Florida Atlantic University Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute designed the hatchery, and oversaw its construction in 2021 by the fishers, look through a microscope at sections.

Funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries’ Saltonstall-Kennedy grant program that supports fishing and marine aquaculture, the hatchery is a partnership among the fishing association; Davis’s queen conch lab at FAU; and Conservación ConCiencia, a Puerto Rico–based NGO founded by Espinoza to tackle poverty as a means to long-term marine conservation.

The egg strand swells with clustered cells that, through the hatchery’s microscope, look like glistening pearls. The larger clusters indicate older embryos. They are likely to have been laid by the mother conch when she started the egg strand. The youngest embryos are those with two to four pearly cells, which may have been laid this morning. If the conch embryos are saved, they will hatch within four days. Davis has discovered that queen conch larvae tend to emerge from their eggs at around 9:00 pm after 40 years of raising them. Evolution has taught them that’s when they can swim free into the ocean currents with fewer predators lurking about.

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To describe the Hell began in the early hours of September 20, 2017. Julio Ortiz, a fisherman, holds his hand up to the sky and describes the height of the sea as it entered his home. When Hurricane Maria drew a bead on Puerto Rico, Ortiz and many other residents felt sure it could not be worse than Hurricane Irma, which they’d ridden out two weeks before. They are used to being inundated by water, land, and the sky. Naguabo is nicknamed El Pueblo de los Enchumbaos—the Town of the Drenched—for its six major rivers and the heavy rains that develop from the sea on one side and the tropical rainforest El Yunque on the other.

Maria arrived less like other hurricanes he’d experienced in his 59 years, Ortiz says, and more as if the sea itself rushed his barrio. Ortiz had put all his fishing gear in a locker at the Naguabo Fishing Association, before he fled to safety at his home across the bay. He’d tied down his fishing boat in the front yard. His wife had taped plastic over all the windows—so the couple did not see the ocean rushing their home. They saw their truck and car submerged in the seawater as it poured through the windows. Ortiz’s fishing boat lurched on its tether. “For 30 seconds, I was lost,” Ortiz says. The couple ran upstairs. The couple ran upstairs again a few hours later as the water began to drain. They ventured back down to discover how fortunate they were to have only lost their earthly possessions.

Shops and homes were left in ruin. Cars and boats were destroyed and tossed around. Winds that exceeded 215 km/h later caused trees and power poles to fall. Weather instruments that were designed to withstand this speed were also destroyed. Naguabo, along with the rest Puerto Rico, was left without power, no cell phone service, and very few navigable roads. Ortiz and other members of the fishing association, many now homeless, started clearing debris to get to their headquarters. Carlos Velazquez, president of the association, said that it looked like a bomb had been dropped when they arrived. Maria had blown out many of the doors and windows, and also destroyed the dock. The gear lockers had been thrown away and all their contents were lost. Every boat was swept out to sea.

As a fishing village, Naguabo was used to securing most of its protein locally—residents buy fish, conch, lobster, and shrimp at the many small fish markets or from food trucks and cafes. But without power, all of the seafood in the town’s freezers spoiled. Without boats and gear, fishers couldn’t go out to catch more. Without any outside assistance, food became scarce over the next few days and weeks. Residents were left without communication from the US government or the territorial government 75 km away in San Juan due to collapsed bridges and cell network.

Espinoza, a young father interested in social justice, drove into chaos two weeks following the storm. Espinoza is a native Ecuadorian, whose family moved from Ecuador to Puerto Rico during college. He then went to San Juan to receive a NOAA Coral Reef Management Fellowship. He joined the Nature Conservancy in the United States and set up the Puerto Rico program. This was his first job with TNC. He missed working with fishermen. From his earliest field experiences in college—like the time he showed Costa Rican kids how they could make more money by guiding tourists to sea turtle nests than by selling the turtle eggs—Espinoza saw how putting people at the center of conservation projects brought the best, most lasting results. He left TNC and founded Conservación ConCiencia in 2016, the year before Maria.

Now, he made his way slowly through downed power lines and trees to the fishing association complex at El Malecón, his Fiat SUV packed with water and food. It was the first aid that arrived in Naguabo. “He came just when we needed him,” Ortiz says. Hurricane Maria’s human toll would reach 2,975 dead across Puerto Rico, including indirect deaths such as kidney patients who couldn’t access dialysis.

Given that scale, it was easy to overlook what happened to marine life as the worst hurricane in the island’s modern history tore through the sea. Velazquez claims that Maria had decimated seagrass beds in the area where queen conchs were bred. It had destroyed reefs where fish gather. It had covered lobsters, conchs, and other marine life with sand and silt. And it had sent tons of debris into marine habitat—including hundreds of traps that were now lost and inadvertently killing sea life.

Working with Naguabo’s and other fishing associations across Puerto Rico, Espinoza set up two emergency relief projects with funding from the Ocean Foundation, the US National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and the NOAA Marine Debris Program. One paid fishers to retrieve lost gear on the seafloor, including the traps—most of which turned out to be illegal. The second project replaced the fishing gear with more sustainable gear. Espinoza paid fishermen to dive for any errant nets or traps that had been washed out to sea for months.

These projects were the most positive experience Naguabo’s fishers ever had with scientists, Ortiz says, even going back to his father and grandfather’s time. “We’ve been through a lot of biologists and we’ve had bad experiences,” Ortiz says, including scientists who convinced them to show them their fishing grounds—only to advise the government to close those grounds. “[Raimundo is] the first biologist we’ve gotten along with.”

So when Espinoza brought them the idea of working with an aquaculture scientist to rebuild their association with a queen conch hatchery—with the fishers paid to help construct it, run it, and harvest the conch eggs—they were all in.

Ramos collected conch eggs and now they hang in an incubator cylinder in a larger seawater tank. Four days old, the embryos now have tiny black eyes, and a small orange foot. They begin to spin inside their egg capsules—as if readying for the race ahead. Right on schedule—it is 9:00 on a Friday night—the embryos start to hatch into what are known as veligers, atom-shaped free swimmers that drift for kilometers on ocean currents in the wild. The tank is filled with thousands upon thousands of veligers that look like animated sand grains. They move in a frenzy of newfound motion. They shimmer in the dark seawater as stars on a pitch black night.

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Megan Davis hasSince her first job at 21 managing a conch hatchery in the Turks and Caicos Islands, queen conchs have been her passion. At the time, she was tall and athletic with long brown hair and a simple smile. She had an idealistic goal to save pink conchs that she had loved since childhood sailing the Caribbean with her family. Davis, now 63, is still tall and athletic with the same smile. However, her long, silver-colored hair has become a blueprint for a hatchery in every country that shares its oceans with the queens.

That first hatchery, its lab a glorified shed with a windmill, was part of the utopian vision of a navy nuclear engineer turned philosopher-biologist named Chuck Hesse. Before the rise of commercial tourism in the Turks and Caicos was realized, Hesse saw the islands as a model biosphere that could be used for ocean conservation, alternative energy and aquaculture. In her two years running the outpost from 1981 to 1983, Davis proved that, under the right conditions, queen conchs will undergo their metamorphosis—from pearly eggs to swimming veligers to shelled infants—in the lab. Once they’re tiny sea snails with four-millimeter-long shells, they can be moved to an outdoor nursery, where they take another year to grow into finger-long conchs. Three years can be required to mature into a breeding-age queen. Conchs can mature faster than others, just like human teenagers. Shell thickness is a better indicator of adulthood than age.

In 1983, Hesse leased government land, raised millions of dollars from investors, and built the world’s first commercial queen conch farm on the island of Providenciales. Davis was a cofounder and the farm’s chief scientist. Caicos Conch Farm, a white geodesic dome with a dome at its center, raised millions of conchs and exported conch meat to the United States. It has grown into a major ecotourism destination. Davis returned to Florida to complete his graduate studies in marine ecology. The operation was taken over by new owners who had bigger ambitions to open fish farms. The farm was destroyed by hurricanes Maria and Irma. Davis was shaped by the venture. She has spent the decades since then working in conch aquaculture at her FAU research laboratory and several small conch farms throughout the Caribbean. She also has a passion for sea vegetable crops and can make a delicious purslane salad.

In Portland, Oregon, the summer after Hurricane Maria, during free time at a meeting of NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee on which they both serve, Davis and Espinoza got to talking about their shared interest in artisanal aquaculture. Davis loved Espinoza’s approach of paying fishers for their expertise and labor. He believed local queen conch hatcheries could be a good proving ground for normalizing fisherman’s compensation. “There are ways to share benefits—to bring them on board and help them generate income from their expertise—just like the rest of us make a living from our expertise,” Espinoza says. “It is fundamental to making the fishing community part of conservation policy and it is fundamental to environmental justice.”

The Naguabo Queen Conch Hatchery, which Davis has helped to build, is the 10th. However, it is the first to be managed by conch fishers as well as other members of the community. They broke ground in late 2019, before the pandemic stopped construction for a year. After Ortiz made the final touches on the water system last summer and seawater flowed in from the nearby bay, Davis and lab manager Victoria Cassar started training the fishers and Espinoza to raise conchs. Marie Garcia, a married woman to one of these fishermen, is learning how to run the lab.

The hatchery manual, which is 80 pages long, has been followed by the fishers and she. It includes photographs and graphics that are easy to understand. Davis and Cassar authored the Open-source guide during their COVID-19 lockdown, also creating a Spanish version and a series of free videos. In order to mimic wild habitat, hatchery workers carefully monitor the seawater conditions and cultivate the two types algae that veligers consume every day. They monitor and record every step of the queens’ incubation, larval development, and metamorphosis. It is a transformation that is as royal as the one from caterpillar to monarch.

 Over three to four weeks, the veligers have sprouted petal-like lobes—first two, then four, then six. They’ve zipped about their tank gobbling algae, which appear golden in their translucent bellies. The six lobes now extend to limb-like extremities, allowing them to test-land on the bottom. It’s time to transform from free swimmers to bottom-dwelling snails. They need a natural cue like the presence of diatoms on seagrass. Davis and her team create a shallow metamorphosis aquarium with low light to mimic seagrass beds. They then add grass blades coated in diatoms. They transfer the veligers from their swimming tank to the shallow tank. Within one day, the Veligers stop swimming and settle at the bottom. They then begin to crawl.

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The end ofQueen conchs are often linked with the rise in consumption in the postwar United States. Rachel Carson observed in the 1950s that even as live conchs were becoming rare in the Florida Keys, the pink shell was “displayed by the hundred at every Florida roadside stand selling tourist souvenirs.” Today in the Keys, native-born residents are still called “conchs,” Key West the “Conch Republic.” The restaurants still fry up conch fritters, and the polished pink shells are still piled in the souvenir shops. But both the meat and the shells are all from the Caribbean.

The collapse of the animal Carson described as “an alert and sentient creature” has much earlier roots in colonialism. Christopher Columbus published his letter in 1493, the year following his landfall in the Caribbean. The accompanying illustration features a striking conch shell as the focal point. It is an idealized scene of the people that he met. The Spanish were greeted by the Indigenous population of the islands, which number in the millions. taíno. The archaeologist William F. Keegan, who has interpreted the human history from conch piles, petroglyphs, tools, and other artifacts for four decades, says taíno translates as “noble” or “good” and that the people may have been reassuring the Spanish of their good intentions rather than introducing themselves by name.

Archaeologists don’t know exactly how many Taíno survived the enslavement, massacres, and diseases that marked the following centuries—though genetic sampling reveals significant Indigenous ancestry in contemporary Puerto Rico. But Taíno stories and artifacts stress the importance of conchs: in their fishing and diving traditions; in the infinite piles of conch they harvested, ate, and honed into tools and jewelry; and in their small spirit objects sculpted into three points—originally inspired by the pointed top of a conch shell.

Keegan states that evidence of conch harvesting began in their time. The British Empire gave the queens their English names, but the export pressure that led to collapse is not related to them. Queen Victoria, a fashionable 18-year-old when she rose to the throne of England in 1837, loved coral-pink shells. (Conchs that live on the seafloor aren’t brightly colored, but are covered in dark fuzz algae. Her brooches and commemorative keepsakes were made by her own cutter. They were a hit with a frenzy of demand. British scientists warned that the molluscan kings were being overfished before the end of the century.

“The profit when converted to cameos and other objets d’art is enormous,” Sir Augustus J. Adderley, Bahamas fisheries commissioner to Britain, wrote in 1883. “I am under the impression that this fish is not so plentiful as it used to be, and that its protection is desirable.” He wanted to advise a closed season to avoid fishing out the queens, “but I fear it is not practicable.”

Since then, science has been overshadowed by political practicalities. At the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Illinois, biologist Andrew Kough has helped quantify the “serial depletion” of queen conchs in the export-heavy Bahamas, research that also identified actions that could save them. They include a larger network of no take reserves, harvest limits that are based on shell thickness, as well as a ban from exports. Officials from Bahamian government pledge support for each one of these measures. Regulation is difficult to sell in a country that has 10,000 conch fishermen. Kough and other scientists predict that the Bahamas will follow the Florida Keys model and lose the fishery.

Kough suggests that science may be able, in theory, to raise healthy conchs. Kough says there is no evidence that cultured juveniles can replicate the wild-like larval journeys. The scale of natural breeding as billions of larvae drift for kilometers in the currents “far exceeds anything we could do in aquaculture,” he says. The same applies to conch populations that fall below the minimum threshold of reproduction, which is directly linked to fishing pressure.

Davis agrees that hatcheries alone can’t save the queens. But she believes aquaculture can take some pressure off wild conchs—and that its role in building a conservation ethos is significant. The Naguabo hatchery has an outdoor touch tank, where tourists and schoolkids can touch a queen and maybe get a glimpse at its long foot or tentacled eye. A Bahamian team is now outfitting a mobile hatchery on Exuma based on Naguabo’s design, to be run with a similar model, by local fishers and community members. “Regulation is really the only other avenue—and that’s up to the countries, to have the management in place and the national parks and marine protected areas,” Davis says. “But to see the fishermen bring back a significant batch of eggs, and then to see those healthy conchs metamorphose in 21 to 28 days, feels like a huge accomplishment.”

The conchs have a perfect shell and are still microscopic after metamorphosis. They’ll be cared for on screened trays in a special tank for the next three weeks, a time of rapid growth. After resorbed their wriggling limbs the tiny creatures develop a clawed foot. They also have other molluscan features, such as a snout-like protruscis to eat and a gill for breathing. A gentle seawater spray and daily observation will ensure that about half of the creatures survive the three to four millimeters required to move from the lab to the nursery outside.