LEAVE THAT SHELL ON THE BEACH AND TAKE A PHOTO INSTEAD : ETHICAL SEA SHELL COLLECTING

Ethical sea shell collecting means:

Leaving any shell that has a living animal alone.

And you may not be able to tell so leave it alone.

Even broken and partial shells are part of the ecosystem.

Some sea creatures will borrow the empty shell of another.

Small fish hide in shells.

Do not buy sea shells by the bag in shops: They have been dredged from the ocean floor which destroys an eco-system. 

It's best not to buy sea shells at all.  You may find some collections for sale or find shells at garage sales and thrift shops, which were found or purchased in the past...

Do not buy plastic reproductions of shells.  Plastic is an overall problem for our environment.

Consider: 

Taking photos of shells to document them.

Draw, paint, or sculpt sea shells.

Pick up sea-polished glass off the beach instead. 

Take anything you bring to the beach back out, recycling bottles and cans and anything else you can.

Join a beach clean-up team for a morning or take some bags with you and fill them up with refuse that other people left behind.

Siren.

SHELL WREATH

 

QUEEN CONCH IS FOOD and COLLECTED BUT ENGANDERED

 

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.

STOP BUYING and COLLECTING SEA SHELLS - AVOID PURCHASING CRAFTS MADE OF SHELLS

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - SEA SHELL COLLECTING and CRAFTS HARMING OCEAN SEALIFE ECOLOGY 

Excerpt: In the little coastal town of Kanyakumari, in southern India, mountains of newly harvested mollusk shells - living animals still inside them - lie drying out near a sun-drenched beach.  Next up for these seashells : a dunking for a few hours in large cats of oil and acid to clean them.  Any remaining flesh or scaly growth is then scraped off each shell by hand by one of hundreds of local o, and they're given another soaking in oil. After a final hand-polishing, many are shipped to artisans in nearby towns who craft jewelry and other memeotos to sell to tourists.  The remaining shells are destined for elsewhere in India and abroad.

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My opinion is if a shell or item that includes shells, such as shelled mirrors, has made it all the way to a charity thrift store, then OK, buy it, but there are so many ways to use draw, paint, mache, or use other techniques to image shells, buying ones that involved killing the animals inside, hurting the ocean n and sea creature ecology is wrong.

SPINEY

Shells that have just one part are called univalves such as the spiney murex above,

 

IS IT ETHICAL TO COLLECT SEA SHELLS? IMPACT TRAVEL ALLIANCE HAS AN OPINION

IMPACT TRAVEL ALLIANCE on ETHICAL SEA SHELL COLLECTING 

EXCERPT:  The idea of killing an animal just to display some of its body parts (much like trophy hunting) may sound disgusting, but many folks are willing to do just that to have a shell, a sand dollar, or a starfish on their shelf  It's not just immoral, it is illegal in Sanibel and Lee Couty (according to the laws about recreational sea shell harvesting in Florida) to "harvest or possess any shells that contain a live organism except for oysters, hard clams (quahogs), sunray venus clams and coquinas."

SEA SHELL COLLECTION

Trying to find shells isn't as easy as it used to be.

In the past shell shops sold shells that had been dredged off the ocean floor.

This decimated their population and habitat.

Shell Collecting includes not only identifying the shell, but recording when and where it was found.

Siren here!  It's April 2022 and I want to say that shell collecting that includes killing the sea creatures within the shell is harmful to the species as well as the entire ocean ecology.