A new eco debate has started: is it really OK to collect shells from the beach?
Ilove the state of Maine. Not just because it gets so cold there in the winter that they felt the need to invent earmuffs (thanks Maine); not just because they were (allegedly) the first people to think of putting holes in doughnuts; and not just because, if you can be bothered to schlep all the way to the top of Cadillac Mountain first thing in the morning, you can be among the first people in the continental US to see the sunrise. No, those are all contributing factors, but the real reason I love Maine is because Mainers take their coastline seriously – really seriously.
On a map showing the whole of the USA, the Pine Tree State doesn’t look like anything special: smallish, north-easterly, shaped a bit like a whale’s tail if you half-close your eyes. Look at a more detailed map, however, and it quickly becomes apparent that its coastline is ludicrously complex, as if drawn by a hyperactive drunken monkey. Maine may only be the 39th largest state by land area, but, thanks to its myriad points and inlets, it has the fourth longest coastline after Alaska, Florida and Louisiana. That’s right: at 3,478 miles its squiggly littoral is longer than California’s (a mere 3,427 miles) and that’s before you start counting the raggedy edges of its toonumerous-to-count islands.
As a result of all this open ocean access, it seems as if pretty much everyone here can sail, or at least operate a powerboat (sometimes it can be easier to get from A to B by water than it is by road) and everyone and their granny knows how to fish. The consumption of lobsters in Maine is something close to a religion, and even after the locals have finished gorging themselves on crustaceans, there’s still enough of a lobster mountain left over to supply almost 90 per cent of total demand in the rest of the US.
It’s not all take take take, either.
The University of Maine has its very own Lobster Institute, the primary purpose of which is to support the lobster industry and help lobster fishermen around the world develop sustainable practices. And as if to hammer home the point that Mainers (or Down Easters as they’re also known, due to the fact that in the summer trading ships used to have to sail downwind to get there from Boston) are careful custodians of the marine environment, one of the state’s foremost newspapers, the Bangor Daily News, recently carried an in-depth article on the ethical dilemmas thrown up by the apparently simple act of collecting seashells.
Anyone who has ever visited a beach with children will be aware of the almost magical hold that seashells can have over small people, and will more than likely also be familiar with the unbearable pressure of being asked to carry handfuls of said treasures back to the car WITHOUT BREAKING ANY OF THEM. Collecting seashells is such a popular pastime in the UK that earlier this month Faber & Faber saw fit to re-publish Philip Street’s 1961 classic Shell Life on the Seashore, with a new introduction by Philip Hoare – one of the great contemporary writers about the life aquatic. Street evidently didn’t seem to have a problem with collecting shells – his book includes an appendix entitled “Some Practical Hints for Collecting and Photographing Shell Life.” But, well, that was then and this is now. Ecologically-speaking, is it OK to remove shells from the beach? Over to the shell experts interviewed by the Bangor Daily News.
On the one hand, Michal Kowalewski, professor of invertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, argues that removal of seashells on a large scale can lead to changes in the “rates and patterns of erosion along the shoreline.” However, leading the case for the defence of junior beachcombers everywhere, José Leal, science director and curator at the Bailey-matthews National Shell Museum, also in Florida, reckons that “generally speaking, the impact people can have on the volume [of shells] that’s there is really, really minimal.”
In the end, both men seem to agree that, as long as you’re not taking shells with creatures still living inside them, and as long as you’re not taking too many of them (according to Kowalewski, a few specimens are fine but bucketloads of shells, not so much), you’re probably not doing any lasting damage to the local ecosystem, and the world will continue to spin merrily on its axis.
All of which is just as well, really, because, as the old saying goes, hell hath no fury like a toddler who’s just been told they have to leave all the shells they’ve collected today at the beach. n
Anyone who has visited a beach will be aware of the almost magical hold seashells can have on small children