A stray shell can make memories, but do not disturb if the mollusk is still at home
By Richard Hoath
One of the older and least-used books on my natural history bookshelves is a volume entitled Collins Pocket Guide to Nests and Eggs by R. S. R. Fitter and is a complete guide to the nests and eggs of European birds. First published in 1954, it was something of a bible for egg collectors of those times when egg collecting was still a popular hobby. But Fitter exhorted his reader not to take eggs from nests, indeed including the less-than-catchy slogan “Take the Book to the Nest NOT the Egg to the Book.” Since then many childhood collectors, most notably the English TV naturalist Bill Oddie, have become ardent advocates of birds and bird watching, and the UK laws against egg collecting are now draconian, including heavy fines and custodial sentences. As a hobby, it is now effectively dead and rightly so.
I was never an egg collector, my childhood being in the late 60s and 70s when it was increasingly outlawed. I did collect though, and one of the joys of my holidays spent in various British coastal resorts was beachcombing and collecting shells, dead shells exposed by ebbing tides retreating from the strand. I was still collecting when I moved to London in my early 20s but was much more savvy in terms of conservation, I avoided the specialist shops dealing in shells so as not to encourage a widespread and often illegal trade that was decimating mollusk populations in many parts of the world. Shells could be big money. As long ago as 1987, a White-toothed Cowrie was sold at auction for $27,000 and the slightly less rare but iconic Glory of the Seas has gone for similar prices.
I switched my attention to the second-hand and charity shops of North London and picked up numerous specimens with a clear conscience. The initial damage had been done by the first collector, I was merely providing the specimen with a good home where it could be readily appreciated. And seashells can be spectacularly beautiful.
Once I was posted to Egypt that interest continued, but the collecting all but stopped. Along much of the coastline, especially Sinai’s Red Sea coast, the letter of the law is quite clear, summed up in the mantras posted in many Protected Areas: “Bring Everything with You. Leave Nothing Behind” or “Leave Nothing but Footprints.” Sadly the stalls in many shops and resorts all along the Red Sea coast — including, on my last visit to Hurghada, a stall outside the Oceanographic Institute — indicate that mantras alone do not work.
The impact of shell collecting, particularly the living shells from the sea itself can be potentially harmful to the marine ecosystem. Many species, despite their hard shells (in the living animal often partly hidden beneath a fleshy mantle as stunning as the shell itself) are prey for other invertebrates such as the various species of octopus that share the reef habitat. The octopus, — a mollusk itself, remember, but without a shell — has a very powerful beak for which even a robust shell is little challenge. Fish such as the porcupinefishes, burrfishes and puffers also take marine mollusks, as does the rare Loggerhead Turtle.
Perhaps the most celebrated of the Red Sea mollusks is Triton’s Trumpet. This is a spectacular invertebrate with a shell up to 50cm long, spiraled to a narrow point and elaborately decorated in beiges, browns and whites. It preys on sea urchins and starfish, most notably that major coral reef pest the Crown of Thorns star. Where the Crown of Thorns is uncontrolled, the reef is gradually destroyed, as the starfish predates the living coral animal leaving a bleached and lifeless reef. As Ewald Lieske and Robert Myers write in their Coral Reef Guide Red Sea, “Populations in most areas [have been] greatly reduced by collecting.”
Even on beaches, seemingly dead shells washed up by the tide may not be as dead as first assumed. Many particularly — cowries, topshells and cone shells — play host to hermit crabs. Hermit crabs are related to the more familiar crabs of hard shell and sideways walking fame but lack the shell that protects the vulnerable abdomen. Instead they commandeer a dead mollusk shell as an inventive alternative.
The digital camera has made collecting superfluous, and images taken underwater of the living animal can be compared at leisure in the fully illustrated Lieske and Myers, where the plates are almost all of the living animals in their habitats.
But beachcombing is still great fun. Here a second book is invaluable: Mary Lyn Rusmore-Villaume’s Seashells of the Egyptian Red Sea. In this book an estimated 80% of the mollusk species recorded from the Egyptian Red Sea have been included, each one photographed and information given on size, appearance and distribution in Egypt. The plates are all of the actual shells as they might be found on the beach, not of the living animal. Rusmore-Villaume’s advice in the book’s introduction reflects almost perfectly the slogan mooted by Fitter 55 years earlier. She writes, “The best way to become skilled at identifying shells is to go to the beach often and take this book with you — and use it.” In effect, bring the book to the shell, NOT the shell to the book.
In the Protected Areas and National Parks especially this is vital, and of course the ubiquitous digital camera can record images of specimens in situ. But kids love to collect. While risking the wrath of more evangelical naturalists, it would be churlish, and impossible to enforce a ban on all beachcombing.
I was staying south of Ain Suhkna near Zafarana in fall last year, and the beach there was covered with washed-up shells of the Common Pinctada or Rayed Pearl Oyster Pinctada radiate. They were everywhere and, being almost flat, worse than useless for even the most desperate hermit crab. The shell is almost circular with a moderately pronounced wing at the hinge. The exterior is dully vermiculated in beiges and browns but the underside, the interior, is lustrous mother of pearl. The kids on the beach were running up and down, picking up what they were calling the “jewels”, and who knows what projects they could have used them for once home: homemade necklaces and bracelets perhaps, decoration for otherwise drab caskets or lampshades or even as “show and tell” once back at school — a memory of a Red Sea holiday.
I still collect but now the obsession is with feathers, and surely there can be no harm in that. I hasten to add I do not run around yanking the feathers out of living birds — I pick molted feathers off the ground! And I have some very special ones. From Uganda I have the tail feather of the Great Blue Turaco. From Ethiopia I have the wing feathers of the White-cheeked Turaco, and then from the highlands of Ethiopia I have the primary wing feather of a Blue-winged Goose, a bird found there and nowhere else in the world.
From further afield I have two breast feathers from a turkey. They are not from the turkey I find cooped up in crates round the corner at the local poulterer. They are not even from the Wild Turkey common across much of the United States and Mexico. No, these modest iridescent, beige-tipped feathers are from the ostentatiously plumaged Ocellated Turkey endemic to the Yucatan Peninsular in Mexico and in neighboring Guatemala and Belize. It is now classified as Near Threatened and I caught up with it in the jungles of Guatemala. And even in a bone-dry and baking Cairo, every time I look at them it takes me back to steamy Central American rainforests echoing with the calls of howler monkeys. Just as I hope those kids from the beaches at Ain Suhkna will one day be taken back to childhood frivolity by their pearly Common Pinctadas. et
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