The Queen Conch’s Gambit

This story was originally published in Hakai Magazine.

Gabriel Ramos waved his arm in excitement as the blue and white boat cut across the bay to Naguabo on the eastern tip of Puerto Rico. The closer the boat skips to shore, the more details emerge: dive tanks clanking in the hull, spearguns for pargos, and more. Only at the dock does the haul become visible, in two buckets at the bottom of the boat. The other is filled with slabs of carrucho. Carrucho is a prized catch. It is the priciest item in the fish markets along El Malec, and it sells for fourteen dollars per pound.

The sliced white flesh heaped in the first bucket is not the prize today. A clump of shelly sand, sealed in a sandwich bag and floating at the bottom of the second bucket, was pumped by Ramos. A string of eggs.

A mother queen lays half a million eggs over a day or so in a strand that is so long it would fit in a semitruck trailer. She camouflages the strand with sand and fusses it into a pile that could be used for coral or shell. Every year, she will send nearly 5 million larval conchs into the sea. The Caribbean's favorite marine snail has a glossy pink shell and is eaten across the 26 countries in its range.

A queen conch shell is as big as a football. The grip is similar to a handle and it weighs less than a brick. That large body makes it easy to spot and catch queen conchs, which have collapsed populations in their habitat in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. The United States lost its queens at the southern tip of Florida. They have not rebounded despite the ban on commercial fishing in Florida since 1975. The big sea snails were listed under the convention to limit trade after the state ban. The losses have gotten worse. The once massive herds of the Bahamas, which export nearly all the conch meat consumed in the United States, have now dwindled below the minimum number needed for the animals to breed.

Saving the species will require bold actions from shrinking the harvest to protecting greater swaths of the seagrass beds. In Puerto Rico, 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 one of the missing pieces of the puzzle, giving the fishers a serious role in recovery efforts, and compensation just like every other expert involved.

One of the 800 fishers in Puerto Rico who dive for carrucho as a main source of income is part of a new model that pays him more for collecting eggs than he earns from harvesting. Ramos scuba dived over a patch of seagrass this morning and grabbed a live queen conch that was destined for market until he saw that it was a breeding mother. Her shell was covered with a sandy egg pile. Instead of cutting out the carrucho meat with his knife, Ramos teased out a quarter of the egg mass with his fingers and put it in the sandwich bag.

At the dock, Ramos is still in his wetsuit, and he is holding a bucket with a donated organ in it. The bucket is being carried into an old dockside building by a biologist. The Naguabo Fishing Association is one of about 40 public-private fishing cooperative in Puerto Rico that support members by buying and marketing their seafood. One of the oldest fishing co-ops on the island was founded more than half a century ago by the grandfathers of some of the fishermen.

The risk of future storms and the twisted and missing parts of the complex remind me of Hurricane Maria. Behind their repaired seafood market and gear-storage lockers, members of the association have responded to the storm with an addition their grandfathers might not have imagined: a hatchery for growing their own queen conchs.

The Naguabo Queen Conch Hatchery has a half indoor lab and half open-air courtyard. In the lab, Ramos and Espinoza peer through a microscope at sections of the egg strand under the eye of Megan Davis, a marine research professor at the Florida Atlantic University. The Saltonstall-Kennedy grant program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration supports fishing and marine aquaculture.

The egg strand swells with clustered cells that look like pearls. The larger clusters are older, meaning the mother laid them when she started the strand. Those with just two or four of the pearly cells are the youngest. The eggs will hatch in four days. In 40 years of growing queen conchs, Davis has learned that the queens tend to wriggle from their eggs at 9:00 at night. When they can swim free into the ocean currents, they have been taught by evolution.

In order to describe the hell that began in the early morning of September 20, 2017, a fisherman holds his hand up to his neck. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, many people felt reassured that it could not be worse than Hurricane Irma. They are used to being in the middle of the ocean, land, and sky. The Town of the Drenched is known as El Pueblo de los Enchumbaos because of its six major rivers and the heavy rains that come from the sea on one side and the tropical rainforest on the other.

The sea rushed his barrio when Maria arrived, less like other hurricanes he'd experienced in his 59 years. After securing his fishing gear in his locker at the Naguabo Fishing Association, he hid across the bay. He tied his boat up in the front yard. The couple didn't see the ocean rushing their home because his wife taped all the windows. They saw their car and truck submerged in the water when the seawater burst through the windows. The fishing boat lurched on its tether. The couple ran. When the water began to drain a few hours later, they realized how lucky they were to have lost nothing.

Shops and homes were destroyed. Cars and boats were thrown. The wind speed at which power poles and trees fell was estimated at 215 kilometers per hour. The rest of Puerto Rico had no power, no cell service, and few roads. The fishing association members began clearing debris to reach their headquarters. Carlos Velazquez says it looked as if a bomb had exploded when they arrived. Maria blew out the windows and doors of the dock. The gear lockers were destroyed. The boats were swept out to sea.

Residents of Naguabo used to buy most of their seafood at the small fish markets or from food trucks. All of the seafood in the town's freezers was spoiled. The fishers couldn't head out for more without boats or gear. Food became hard to find as days went by and there was no help. 75 kilometers away in San Juan, residents were stranded without word from either the US government or the territorial government.

Two weeks after the storm, a young father with a special interest in social justice drove into this chaos. After graduating from college in the US, he moved to San Juan for a fellowship with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, where he worked on coral reef management. He was the first employee of the Puerto Rico program of the Nature Conservancy. He missed working with fishers. He showed Costa Rican kids how they could make more money by guiding tourists to sea turtle nests than by selling turtle eggs. In the year before Maria, he founded Conservación ConCiencia.

He made his way through the downed power lines and trees to the fishing association complex, his SUV full of water and food. It was some of the first aid to arrive. The human toll from Hurricane Maria would reach 2,975 dead across Puerto Rico, including indirect deaths. It was easy to overlook what happened to marine life as the worst Hurricane in the island's modern history tore through the sea. When the fishers got to their grounds, they found that Maria had ripped up the seagrass beds. The reefs where fish gather had been shattered. The lobsters were smothered with sand and silt. Hundreds of traps that were lost and inadvertently killing sea life were among the tons of debris sent into marine habitats.

The Ocean Foundation, the US National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and the NOAA Marine Debris Program funded the emergency relief projects. Most of the illegal traps that one paid fishers to retrieve were found to be illegal. 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 Fishers were paid to dive for gear that had been swept out to sea after the storm.

The most positive experience fishers have had with scientists was these projects, even going back to his father's and grandfather's times.

They were all in for 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.

The eggs collected by Ramos are now in a larger tank of water. Four days old, the embryo has developed tiny black eyes and an orange foot. They start to spin inside their egg capsule as if readying for the race. It is 9:00 on a Friday night, and the embryos start to hatch into veligers, atom-shaped free swimmers that drift for kilometers on ocean currents in the wild. Veligers fill the tank with sand grains. They move with a flurry of motion. They are like the stars of the universe on a dark night.

At the age of 21, Megan Davis started growing queen conchs as a hobby and has grown them ever since. She was tall and athletic, with long brown hair, an easy smile, and an idealistic goal to help save the pink conchs she had loved since childhood vacations sailing the Caribbean with her family. At 63, Davis is still tall and athletic, with the same smile, though her long hair has turned silver and her goal has developed into a template for a locally run hatchery in every nation that shares its seas with the queens.

The utopian vision of a navy nuclear engineer turned philosopher-biologist named Chuck Hesse was part of the utopian vision of the first hatchery. He saw the Turks and Caicos as a model for ocean preservation, alternative energy, and aquaculture before commercial tourism took off. Davis ran the outpost for two years in 1981 and 1983, and she proved that queen conchs will undergo their transformation in the lab. Once they are tiny sea snails with long shells, they can be moved to an outdoor nursery where they can grow into finger-long conchs. It can take three years to bulk into a queen. The shell thickness is a better indicator of adulthood than the age.

The world's first commercial queen conch farm was built on the island of Providenciales in 1983, after Hesse leased government land, raised millions of dollars from investors, and built it. The farm's chief scientist was Davis. The Caicos Conch Farm was founded in a white dome and grew into a major ecotourism destination. Davis earned graduate degrees in marine ecology in Florida. New owners want to expand into fish farms. The utopian dome set against the blue-green sea was damaged by Hurricanes. The venture helped shape Davis, who has spent the ensuing decades working on conch farms around the Caribbean. She makes a mean purslane salad and specializes in sea vegetable crops.

In Portland, Oregon, the summer after Hurricane Maria, during free time at a meeting of the Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee on which they both serve, Davis and Espinoza got to talking about their shared interest in artisanal aquaculture. Davis liked the idea of paying fishers for their expertise and labor. He thought the local run queen conch hatcheries would be a good place to show compensation to fishers.

The Naguabo Queen Conch Hatchery is the 10th that Davis has helped build over the years, but the first to be run by community members. Construction was halted for a year after they broke ground. After the final touches were made on the water system last summer, Davis and the lab manager started training the fishers and Espinoza to raise the animals. Marie is married to a fisherman and is learning to run the lab. She and the fishers follow a step-by-step hatchery manual. During the Covid-19 lockdown, Davis and Cassar wrote an open-source guide, as well as creating a Spanish version and a series of free videos. The two types of algae the veligers eat every day are cultured in a way that mimics wild habitat. They record every step of the queens' development. It is a transformation from caterpillar to monarch.

The veligers have sprouted six petals over the course of three to four weeks. Their tank gobbling algae look golden in their bellies. The six lobes have been stretched out to allow them to test-land and find food on the bottom. It's time to change from free swimmers to snails. They need a natural cue such as the presence of diatoms. Davis and her team prepare a shallow metamorphosis tank with low light and add grass blades. The veligers are sieved from the swimming tank to the shallow tank. Within a day, the veligers stop swimming and begin to crawl.

The rise of consumption in the United States has been linked to the demise of queen conchs. The pink shell was displayed by the hundred at every Florida roadside stand selling tourist souvenirs, even as live conchs were becoming rare in the Florida Keys. The meat and shells come from the Caribbean.

The collapse of the animal that was described as an alert and sentient creature hasTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkias hasTrademarkiaTrademarkiasTrademarkias hasTrademarkiaTrademarkiasTrademarkiasTrademarkias hasTrademarkiasTrademarkiasTrademarkias hasTrademarkiasTrademarkias hasTrademarkias hasTrademarkias hasTrademarkias hasTrademarkia Christopher Columbus published his letter announcing the discovery of the New World in 1493. An idealized scene of the people he met is depicted in the accompanying illustration. The Spanish were greeted with the word taíno by the Indigenous population.

Archaeologists don't know how many people survived the enslavement, massacres, and diseases of the following centuries. There are no stories or artifacts that stress the importance of conchs in their fishing and diving traditions, in the infinite piles of conch they harvest, ate, and hone into tools and jewelry, and in their small spirit objects sculpted into three points.

Evidence of overharvesting begins in their time. The British Empire gave the queens their English name because of the export pressure. Queen Victoria loved the coral- pink shells when she ascended the throne. The conchs are not glossy pink, but have a dark fuzz of algae. She used her own cutter to make her brooches and keepsakes. British scientists warned that the monarchs were being overfished.

Sir Augustus J. Adderley wrote in 1884 that the profit when converted to art is enormous.

Science has been overtaken by political practicalities. Andrew Kough is a Biologist at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Illinois. There are no-take reserves, harvest limits based on shell thickness, and a ban on exports. The government of the Bahamas will support each of those measures. It's hard to sell regulation in a nation with so many fishers. Kough and other scientists say that the Bahamas will lose the fishery if it doesn't have it.

Kough says that science may be able to raise healthy conchs and return them to the sea. There is no evidence that releasing cultured juvenile could replicate the journeys seen in the wild. He says that the scale of natural breeding as billions of larvae drift for kilometers in the currents far exceeds anything we could do in farming. There is no saving a population if it falls below the minimum threshold for reproduction.

Hatcheries alone can save the queens. She believes that the role of aquaculture in building a conservativism ethos is significant. School kids and tourists can pick up a queen in the outdoor touch tank at the Naguabo hatchery. A team from the Bahamas is working with local fishers and community members to build a mobile hatchery on Exuma that will be similar to Naguabo's design.

The shell of the metamorphosiss is still small after the conch. They will be cared for on screened trays in a special tank for the next three weeks. A snout-like proboscis to eat, a gill to breathe, and a clawed foot are some of the features of the tiny creatures. Half of the animals will survive to the length of three or four millimeters if they are fed and watched daily.

The word was not given to us by the Taíno. They called them the centers of great wind. They depicted the storms on pottery in a way that looked similar to today's satellite images of hurricanes. The archaeologist says that iconography and innovation do not reflect the true nature of the people who sought balance from farming and fishing to their deities.

fishers seek balance The fathers and grandfathers of the association always told their sons to leave carrucho alone. The three sons were raised by their father. Climate change is the greatest challenge for the two people who remain in the business. He used to fish for about five days a week in his childhood. Climate scientists have found that the amount of rain has increased in Puerto Rico in the last half century.

The hatchery is a good place to work when it is too windy to fish. It is a source of local food when there is a shortage. The small harbor in the Town of Drenched is a safe place for people.

The juvenile conchs, shells large enough to balance on your fingertip, are now moved to shallow blue tanks stacked like shelves in the courtyard-style nursery. The fiberglass roof lets in the sun. The tank bottoms are covered with sand. The juvenile queens are buried in the sand for much of their first year of life.

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