Cynthia Barnett (dark atlas, The same magazine) writes about the region’s first and only locally run hatchery—the Naguabo Queen Conch Hatchery in Puerto Rico—which provides an incentive for both fishermen and the endangered king conch.
[Many thanks to Mary Ann Gosser Esquilín for sharing the link to the video below of “Tour of the Naguabo Queen Conch Hatchery in Puerto Rico” by the FAU Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute.] See excerpts from Barnett’s article below:
As the BELD-WHITE Skiff CUTs the bay to Naguabo on the eastern tip of Puerto Rico, fisherman Gabriel Ramos is the first to come into focus, waving his arm excitedly. The closer the ship passes to shore, the more details emerge: diving tanks clattering against the hull, grappling gaffs octopus (octopus), spear for pargos (snappers). Only at the dock does the day’s cargo become visible, in two buckets at the bottom of the boat. One is filled with tiles carrucho– queen case. Carrucho is a valuable catch. Selling for US$14 per pound, it is the most expensive item at the fish markets along El Malecón de Naguabo, the waterfront promenade known for its fresh seafood.
However, today’s shell fare is not the sliced white meat piled into the first bucket. Ramos is pumped around what looks like a wad of shell sand, sealed in a sandwich bag and floating in the seawater at the bottom of the second bucket. It is a string of conch eggs.
A queen mother cocoon lays half a million eggs over the course of a day or more on a gelatinous thread that, unfurled, would stretch longer than a semi-truck trailer. She camouflages the thread with sand as she goes, blending it into a neat pile that could pass for some coral or shell. Deploying nine or more masses each season, it will send about five million conch larvae out to sea a year. Less than one percent will survive to become the Caribbean’s favorite sea snail, with its shiny pink shell and sweet flesh eaten in all 26 countries in its range.
A king mushroom shell can grow as large as a football. Its handle-like hollow gives it a similarly satisfying grip, though it weighs closer to a brick. This mass makes queen conches 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 the first to lose its queens, which once thrived on the southern tip of Florida. They have not recovered despite Florida’s ban on commercial snail fishing since 1975 and all harvest since 1986. After the state’s ban, giant sea snails were listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and Wildlife to monitor and limit trade. The losses have only accelerated. Scientists have warned that the once-massive herds of the Bahamas’ mushroom – which export almost all the mushroom meat consumed in the United States – have now thinned below the minimum number needed for the animals to reproduce.
Saving the species will take bold action, scientists say, from reducing harvesting to protecting larger areas of seagrass beds, where the mushrooms gather in flocks to graze and breed. This is no less true in Puerto Rico, where the animals are in decline, but slightly more protected than in the Bahamas – with a closed season each summer to allow the mushrooms to reproduce. Ramos represents another key piece that is too often missing from the conservation puzzle: giving fishermen a serious role in recovery efforts and compensating them for that work just like any other expert involved.
Ramos, one of about 800 fishermen in Puerto Rico who dive for carrion as their main source of income, is part of this new reciprocal model that pays him more for collecting eggs than he earns from harvesting mushrooms. Diving on a patch of seagrass this morning in about 15 meters of water, Ramos grabbed a live queen shell—bound for market until he saw it was a breeding mother. A pile of sandy eggs lay beneath her shell. Instead of slicing through the carruco’s flesh with his knife, Ramos teased a quarter of the egg mass with his fingers, slipped it into the sandwich bag, and returned the shell to her brood left at the bottom of the sea.
At the dock, still wearing his wet suit, Ramos hands over the bucket of shell eggs as if carrying a donated organ on its way to a transplant. Conservation biologist Raimundo Espinoza grabs the bucket and carries it to an old building by the harbor. The two-story complex is home to the Naguabo Fishing Association, one of about 40 public-private fishing cooperatives in Puerto Rico that support members by buying and marketing their seafood. Naguabo’s is one of the island’s oldest fishing cooperatives, 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 the direct hit from Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the risk of future storms. But behind their renovated seafood market and hardware storage closets, association members have responded to the hurricane with an addition their grandparents might not have imagined: a nursery for growing their queen’s mushrooms.
Half indoor laboratory, half open-air yard, the Naguabo Queen Conch Hatchery explodes in an orderly network of tubes and filters, deep tanks and shallow basins, beakers and carboys swirling with algae. In the lab, Ramos and Espinoza peer through a microscope at sections of the egg under the keen eye of Megan Davis, a professor of marine research at Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, who designed the birds and oversaw its construction by fishermen in 2021. Funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Saltonstall-Kennedy Fisheries grant program that supports marine fisheries and aquaculture, the plant is a partnership between the fisheries association; Davis Queen’s Fungal Lab at FAU; and Conservación ConCiencia, a Puerto Rico-based NGO founded by Espinoza to address poverty as a tool for long-term marine conservation. [. . .]
For the full article, see https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/queen-conch-puerto-rico and https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-queen-conchs-gambit/
