Gee, Fred,
 
I sure like your answer. I too thought everyone was dwelling on the cost a
lot. Shells can be much more than that. Even though my favorite shell
species, cheap or expensive, is a Thatcheria mirabilis, it wouldn't be one
I would take in a disaster. I could get a new one.
 
I too am sentimental. I'd take a beat up old Spondylus ictericus for one
(maybe it would have to count as two!) One year my husband and I were
shelling on Long Key at the state park. Actually it was the year they were
dredging the place out to make the park. I found a single beat-up valve of
a Spondylus ictericus (thought then it was S. gussoni, but that confusion
has been cleared up long since.) Mostly a beach sheller then, I had never
found even a sniff of a Spondylus before and so I kept it. The next year we
went back to see the new park and  I found another valve of a Spondylus
whatever. Wow, I thought, a Spondylus beach! Kept it too. About a year
later I was finally getting to cleaning up the take from that shelling trip
to the Keys. Got the two valves near each other and idly tried fitting them
together. Guess what!? Yep, they fit. The word "serendipity" certainly was
created for that turn of events!
 
Another shell is a little 45mm Conus regius from the Keys...my first live
collected cone ever. I nearly drank Hawk Channel when I lifted that old
sheet of plywood and spotted it! It had its little spire all encrusted in a
mass of limey crud, hard as nails. I picked it clean over a year of casual
picking. Earned that one! And it has SUCH a pretty pattern, which I got to
know really well in that year.
 
And a third is a Cerion, one of those land shells from the Keys and
Caribbean that they call Peanut Snails. (Didn't we -- some of us --  talk
about them before?)  Anyway, I found a lot of dead ones on my first ever
trip to the Keys while prowling around in the beach scrub chasing hermit
crabs and fiddlers and getting a good crop of noseeum bites (a whole pile
of sentiment for me in the Keys!). Many years later when I was finally
cataloguing my collection, I asked Walter Sage about them. He told me how
they differ from island to island, (and Tucker's Compendium of Landshells
really illustrates that variation well...wish I had had it then!) and began
to sort through them. Suddenly Walter plucked out one shell from that lot I
had picked up back in the early 70's, one with some color pattern instead
of the uniform whitish gray of the others,and a little differently shaped
from the others. "Where did you get this one?" he demanded. Then he told me
about Dr. Paul Bartsch planting Caribbean species of Cerion on the Keys to
see how they would survive. Walter said this one oddball must be one of the
descendants of those shells Bartsch planted, or a hybrid. And so unique,
nothing else like it again, and my very own, memories and all.
 
I think shells that have stories are much more special than expensive ones.
 In fact, three shells won't be enough...there's the Lightning Whelk with
the 2" rectangular notch (sharply and cleanly) cut out of its lip which had
then healed over. And there's the little Cyphoma mcgintyi I plucked from
among a zillion Cyphoma gibbosum on sea fans in the Keys, and Richard
accdentally dumped in the canal with the cleanings from the other shells,
and I snorkeled the canal next day til, in triumph over the odds and
elements, I refound it. And then there's.....
 
Lynn Scheu
[log in to unmask]
Louisville, KY, Home of the 1999 COA Convention, where we are going to have
a Silent Auction for connoisseurs! There is even a shell with a data slip
from the Panamanian Exposition! 1898, if I remember right. Now that's unique!
 
Fred Vervaet wrote:
>I'm a little surprised by the answers on the three shells you would like
to save
>at the last minute, but maybe I'm just sentimental. The shells choosen
seem to
>be expensive, but replaceble. I know for which shells I would go, being the
>irreplaceble. Right the shells which you collected your self or have special
>memories about. .....