Excerpts pages 269-270 : No human reimagining of a shell comes close to the Queen Conches' own transformative life cycle. The animals ride the currents as larvae, hide in seagrasses when they are little conches, hang out in grainy sand and rubble in middle age, and hope and leap to deep-sand channels when they reach old age., They are not all queens. They are female or male and must join up to mate, unlike the bivalves that send their eggs and sperm into the sea to meet the currents.
In the springtime, mature conchs gather in large herds and graze on algae, plowing the nourishment into eggs and sperm. The herds are crucial to their survival, scientists say it takes at least ninety Queen Conchs in a hectare to successfully reproduce. Each female will develop a million eggs. A male scoots over to stretch its long, spade=tipped penis underneath her shell. Within a day after her eggs are fertilized, the mother makes a little trench in the sand and poles up a half a million or so in a gelatinous strand, that, if extended, would stretch longer than a basketball court. She uses her all -purpose foot to camouflage the strand with sand as she goes, coating and heaping until it could pass for a hung of white coral. She lays about nine of these egg masses each season, bringing nearly 5 million larval concha a year into the world. Fewer than 1 percent - 50,000 or so - may survive to become adult queens.
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