A slow-moving, long-lived marine snail, the queen conch (Strombus gigas syn. Lobatus gigas) inhabits seagrass beds in Caribbean and western Atlantic Ocean waters, including those around the Florida Keys. The conch’s large, pink-lipped shell is valued among shell collectors, and its meat is a dietary staple for many Caribbean cultures. The conch has become a symbol of the relaxed pace of life in the Florida Keys, where the human natives affectionately refer to themselves as "conchs."
The queen conch refers to both the large, marine mollusk and its shell alone. Queen conchs (pronounced “konks”) are soft-bodied animals, belonging to the same taxonomic group (Mollusca) as clams, oysters, octopi, and squid. They live in shallow, warm waters on coral reefs or sea grass beds. A queen conch can reach up to 12 inches in length and can live for up to 40 years. Its shell grows as the mollusk grows, forming into a spiral shape with a glossy pink or orange interior.
Queen conch meat is consumed domestically throughout the Caribbean and exported as a delicacy. Conch shells and shell jewelry are sold to tourists and the live animals are used for the aquarium trade. Their slow growth, occurrence in shallow waters and late maturation make queen conch particularly susceptible to over-fishing, their greatest threat. Habitat degradation, over-fishing, and the use of SCUBA have led to harvest of previously unexploited populations in deeper waters.
Queen conch was once found in high numbers in the Florida Keys but, due to a collapse in conch fisheries in the 1970s, it is now illegal to commercially or recreationally harvest queen conch in Florida. The United States is responsible for the consumption of 80% of the world’s internationally traded queen conch.
International trade in the Caribbean queen conch is regulated under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) agreement, in which it is listed as Strombus gigas. This species is not endangered in the Caribbean as a whole, but is commercially threatened in numerous areas, largely due to extreme overfishing.
A Bahama Starfish (Oreaster reticulatis)
It is illegal in Florida to harvest any Bahama Starfish under any circumstances
Recreational Sea Shell Collecting in Florida
Is it legal to possess a Queen Conch shell in Florida?
Short answer is yes. Longer answer, you can have the shell as long as you had nothing to do with killing the conch that lived inside the shell. More on Florida regulations pertaining to recreational Sea Shell Collecting below.
The recreational collection of sea shells is allowed depending on whether or not the harvested sea shell contains a living organism, the type of organism it contains and where you will be collecting.
Sea shells containing live organisms cannot be sold unless the seller has a valid commercial saltwater products license.
Live oysters (68B-27, F.A.C. ) and live hard clams (quahogs) (68B-17, F.A.C.) can only be harvested in accordance FWC rules, and all species of clam, oyster or mussel can only be harvested from designated approved or conditionally approved shellfish harvesting areas that are in the open status as determined by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
License Requirement: A Florida recreational saltwater fishing license is required in order to harvest a sea shell containing a living organism, even when harvesting from shore. See shoreline fishing FAQs for more information.
Florida Closed and Restricted Areas:
In Lee County, you may not harvest or possess any shells that contain a live organism except for oysters, hard clams (quahogs), sunray venus clams and coquinas.
In Manatee County, you may not harvest or possess more than two shells (includes echinoderms such as sand dollars and starfish) containing live organisms of any single species except for oysters, hard clams, sunray venus clams and coquinas per day.
Also, the harvest of certain species may be limited or prohibited in state or federal parks, national wildlife refuges and portions of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Interested persons should contact those park areas for further information.
Prohibited Species: All harvest of the Bahama Starfish (Oreaster reticulatis) is prohibited. Possession of live Queen Conch (Strombus gigas) at any time is prohibited. It is not unlawful to possess queen conch shells in Florida as long as the shells do not contain any living queen conch at the time of collection, and so long as a living queen conch is not killed, mutilated, or removed from its shell prior to collection. Possession of conch meat or a queen conch shell having an off-center hole larger than 1/16 inch in diameter through its spire is prohibited.
Bag Limits: Seasons, bag limits, and other regulations must be followed for species that are regulated by the FWC, such as bay scallops even when these species are not collected for food. The bag limit for marine life (tropical ornamental) species is 20 organisms per person per day. As of July 1, 2009, only five of any one marine life species is allowed within the 20-organism marine life bag limit. For unregulated species, more than 100 pounds or 2 fish per person per day (whichever is greater) is considered commercial quantities and requires a saltwater products license.
Discarded shells from harvest conch pile up under a dock near Eleuthra.
Photo Jenny Staletovich, The Miami Herald
The conch is mostly gone from Florida.
Can the Bahamas save the queen?
Can the Bahamas save the queen?
BY JENNY STALETOVICH
The Miami Herald
The queen of the sea, a monster mollusk that inspired its own republic in Florida but now is as likely to be found in a frying pan or a gift shop as the ocean floor, is in trouble.
A marine preserve in the Bahamas famed for its abundance of queen conchs and intended to help keep the country’s population thriving is missing something: young conchs. Researchers studying the no-take park off Exuma, one of hundreds throughout the Caribbean, found that over the last two decades, the number of young has sharply declined as adult conchs steadily matured and died off. The population hasn’t crashed yet like it has in the Florida Keys, but in the last five years, the number of adult conchs in one of the Bahamas’ healthiest populations dropped by 71 percent.
Shedd Aquarium researcher Andrew Kough set sail from Miami earlier this month for a 12-day research trip to Exuma where the team will try to find and document young queen conchs. Photo Carl Juste
For the slow-moving slugs that gather by the hundreds to mate, scientists fear a new, unexpected threat may now doom the park’s population: old age.
The discovery also raises questions about the effectiveness of marine preserves, long viewed as a solution to reviving over-fished stocks. If one of the Caribbean’s oldest and best marine preserves isn’t working to replenish one of its biggest exports — now regulated as tightly as lobster — what does that mean for other preserves and how they’re managed?
Conch, the national food of the Bahamas, is served in salads and fritters. Cracked conch, deep fried and served on a sandwich with hot sauce, is among its most famous dishes. Photo: Lars Topelmann.
“We can see [the preserve] works for grouper and sharks,” said Andrew Kough, lead author of a study published earlier this month and a larval expert at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. “But for a lot of the animals you don’t consider as much, for example conch that are tied to a complex life cycle of larval dispersal, it’s not working.”
To find out why, Kough and a team of researchers set sail this month from Miami aboard a Shedd research boat — imagine the Belafonte minus the mini sub in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” For 12 days, they’ll dive the deep channels surrounding the park in search of young conchs to count and measure. They’ll also take DNA samples to determine where the conchs are coming from. If they can trace the path of the young conchs, the hope is they can find a better way to protect them and manage the fishery.
“The babies are either not coming in in high enough numbers to replenish the adults or there’s something else going on in the park that’s an unintended consequence,” Kough said. “There’s so many sharks and rays inside the park they could just be chowing down on baby conchs.”
In the Florida Keys, the ghost of the conch looms large: in oversized highway replicas, T-shirts, and horns. When he took the throne as king of the Conch Republic, treasure hunter Mel Fisher carried a scepter crowned with a queen conch. But in the Caribbean, conch remains a vital part of the economy, and the reason its governments are so concerned.
Distribution of queen conch age classes throughout the survey area in the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park during May 2016.
Conchs used to be prevalent in Florida, too. But decades of overfishing nearly wiped them out. In the mid 1980s the U.S. banned their harvest to save what was left. Yet more than three decades later, they still have not recovered in Florida waters, an inauspicious sign for the Caribbean.
Across the Caribbean, conchs are as good as currency. Almost anyone who can swim can grab one from the ocean floor and sell it or serve it. Cracked conch or conch salad appears on almost every menu. Their pink-lipped shells line porches and walkways. Countless docks are littered with piles of discarded shells. They are used for everything from jewelry to bait. Whole industries, from fishermen to exporters, depend on a healthy population.
But regulating them as been uneven. While some islands impose seasons and limits on takes — in the Turks and Caicos conch season starts in October and there are set limits on numbers and size — other have not. Populations have plummeted in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Honduras, prompting the U.S. to ban their imports.
The Bahamas has taken an aggressive approach. In 2013, the government launched a “Conchservation” campaign to save what it considers a national treasure that once gathered in vast herds along miles of flats and seagrass meadows.
In recent years, Kough said those herds have thinned considerably, driving populations down. In the Berry Islands, he said, previous surveys found the sea bottom littered with conchs, which can live up to 40 years and not only hold an important place in the food chain but graze on algae that can kill seagrass. The last time his team visited, Kough said, they found hardly any big adults.
“The fishermen are going further to get the animals,” he said. “We found a lot of sub adults and juveniles as well, but it’s the adults that are in decline and that just screams fishing.”
Scientists believe a healthy population needs between 50 and 100 adults conchs for every 2.5 acres to sustain itself. The patchier the clusters, the harder it is for populations to find each other and connect.
Working with the Bahamian government, Kough hopes to better understand how the conchs are circulating — or more precisely the baby conchs. About five days after female conchs release their eggs in long sandy strands, larvae emerge and get caught up in currents. Because the larval stage can last up to a month, the babies can float more than 100 miles. Kough suspects the young conchs from the preserve are winding up in unprotected areas hammered by harvesting.
Although the Bahamas restricts fishing, Kough said tighter measures may be needed. Regulations currently allow the take of any conch with a flared lip, the smooth curve on its rosy shell, which for years has been considered the indication of a mature conch. Scientists now believe the thickness of the shell is a better measure of maturity, triggering a local move to change rules to require shells be at least as thick as a Bahamian penny.
“You don’t want to pull up juveniles. You want animals to reproduce,” Kough said.
Kough is hoping the team can find some answers by studying currents to map the ocean highways traveled by conch larvae.
“It’s a lot more complex because the animals are spending so much time out in the open ocean and outside the boundaries because they’re dispersing as larvae,” he said. “You can’t create a huge ocean open park. Well you could, but how would you enforce that?”
The international community has vowed to protect 30 percent of the world’s coastlines by 2030 to keep fisheries sustainable. But, Kough said, the Bahamas is in the difficult position of having within its borders vast flats and shallows not considered shoreline that should be protected but could exhaust limited resources.
“They recognize there’s a problem. That’s the really important thing,” he said. “So they want to take steps to fix it before it turns into something like Florida, where the population just crashed and still hasn’t recovered.”
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Neymar: Football's (Soccer's) Billion Dollar Man
Neymar's Transfer is About $1 billion, and a Whole Lot More
BARCELONA — By Thursday evening, the reality had swept across an irked Barcelona and a flabbergasted Europe to a high-reaching Qatar and beyond: An athlete really could fetch $263 million just to transfer him from one club to another, before even beginning the negotiation of his wages.
Neymar da Silva Santos Jr., the 25-year-old Brazilian known to soccer intellectuals since his midteens simply as Neymar, will leave the globally admired Barcelona club after four seasons. He will relocate to the top French league and the club Paris Saint-Germain, entities considered less upper-crust than the top Spanish league and Football Club Barcelona. The spectacular move, at a total cost of more than a half-billion dollars to his ambitious new employer, has little to do with business and more to do with prestige and political perceptions.
In the United States, if LeBron James wants to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers, he will demand a trade or wait for his lucrative contract to expire after the NBA’s 2017-2018 season, then become a free agent. It’s the straightforward way traditional U.S. professional sports leagues operate and the way players are able to change teams.
Now consider Neymar, who is under contract for almost four more years. Paris Saint-Germain wanted him very badly. Neymar wanted to spread his wings and escape the shadow of teammate Lionel Messi, winner of five of the past eight Ballon d’Or awards as the world’s top player. There are virtually no trades in international soccer. So the only way the Paris organization could acquire Neymar is through a transfer. In other words, it must buy him from Barcelona for a $263 million fee that doesn’t even include his contract, which will run in excess of $36 million annually for five years.
“The first word that comes to mind is insane,” said Marc Ganis, co-founder of Chicago-based Sportscorp, a leading sports business firm. “There’s no way that it makes any economic sense. It’s insane. It’s beyond insane.”
The transfer fee, more than double the previous record spent on a player, appears to be worth it for the owners of PSG, as the club is widely known. Many soccer observers see the move as an effort by its leaders to elevate the image of Qatar, whose government owns the French club. The oil-rich Persian Gulf state has been the subject of widespread negative publicity stemming from its controversial selection to host the 2022 World Cup and is under a trade embargo imposed by its Middle East neighbors.
The Neymar initiative, however, is consistent with PSG’s mission to extend its success beyond French borders and join the upper echelon of European soccer. The team has won four of the past five domestic league trophies but has never appeared in a Champions League title game. The most recent disappointment came in March, when PSG was the victim of the greatest comeback in the 62-year history of the event. It came against Neymar and Barcelona.
Now PSG believes it has its missing piece in Neymar.
Barcelona didn’t necessarily want to sell him. It has won seven of the past nine Spanish league titles and four of the past 12 Champions League competitions, a continent-wide tournament that is considered the most prestigious crown in global professional soccer. The club is estimated to be worth more than $3.6 billion, ranking fourth in the most recent Forbes listing of the most valuable sports franchises in the world. And Neymar is among its most valuable assets, widely regarded as the third-best player, behind Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, in the world’s most popular sport.
But all high-end players have release clauses in their contract, which means if another team tenders a transfer offer of that specified amount, the current club must sell. No one figured to hit Neymar’s astronomical figure. The previous mark was $125 million, paid last year by Manchester United to acquire French midfielder Paul Pogba from Italian power Juventus.
PSG’s efforts tested a European soccer rule known as Financial Fair Play, established in 2011 to prevent teams from falling into deep debt. Teams that violate the terms are subject to fines and other sanctions. It’s unclear whether the club has broken the rules.
Ganis said PSG will reap some economic benefits from employing Neymar, who will raise the profile of the team, sell tickets, attract sponsorships and perhaps help collect championship earnings.
“It will cover some of the cost,” Ganis said, “but there’s no way for it to make economic sense. They can only chip away at it.”
Sports-wise, it has paved a curious road, with an ambitious French club serving as a test case for how much one star might lift its fortunes. And on the other side, a proud soccer city was left bereft and miffed.
In Barcelona, there were reports of vandalism of Neymar ads around town. A tabloid newspaper showed a photo of Neymar driving off in his car under the headline “¡HASTA NUNCA!” (“See you never!”).
Outside Camp Nou stadium, where Neymar, Messi and Uruguayan Luis Suarez formed perhaps the most glamorous offensive attack in the sport’s history, you still could buy a Neymar shirt for 99 euros ($117) from the official merchandise trailer. You just couldn’t see it until a clerk withdrew it from behind the visible shirts such as Messi’s.
Photos and cartoons of Neymar appeared here and there, painted on the side of the trailer, on a machine where you could buy a commemorative Neymar coin (or a Messi coin) for 4 euros ($4.75) and on a photo near the entrance featuring Neymar and Messi seated among 15 children with a message in Catalan that translated as, “Who values you, wins.”
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