Dear Vicky, Paul, Masashi, Shea, Richard, Brian, Wayne, and Paul,
Thank you for your stories! I'm particularly intrigued by the thread "taking
a life of its own" in Japan and Easter Island, and have a question about
Easter Island shells.
I read (in Paul Bahn and John Flenley's "Easter Island, Earth Island" and
more recently in Jared Diamond's "Collapse") that Easter Island, or Rapanui,
was once forested but is nearly treeless today owing to human activity. The
population rose over a period of a few hundred years and then collapsed.
Every edible resource was exploited. Is there evidence of extirpation of
molluscan species, such as landsnails, here? When a forest is removed
permanently, one would expect all sorts of disruptions.
My "remotest place" was Patagonia, but I'm not sure it counts, because
collecting wasn't allowed there. Anyway, in April 2004, there were long,
long stretches of lonely cliffside beach alongside a good coastal highway.
Our hosts drove right onto the beach and crunched innumerable shells that we
were not allowed to collect! Even Argentine academics can find it difficult
to get permits to collect fossils in one province to reposit in a museum in
another province, and when the group found some well-preserved fossil crabs,
they noted the locality carefully for a later visit.
The sky was wild! The winds are fierce in Patagonia and the clouds are
whipped into shapes I had never seen before, unsullied by jet contrails. The
air is still clean there; I remember when American skies were not typically
brownish at the horizon, but milky white. It was strange to have childhood
memories return in such a remote place.
Of course, to Patagonians, this land, which is a catchword for isolation, is
not remote at all. But they do feel isolated to some degree; it is hard for
academics to attend international meetings in most other countries, for
instance, and they thirst for information! If you visit an academic in a
remote place, a book makes a very good gift! Come to think of it, books make
good gifts everywhere.
Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama
-----Original Message-----
From: Conchologists List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Vicky Wall
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 10:21 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Remote places
Hello Everyone,
I am enjoying very much the shelling stories that have been posted this
week....I haven't had the chance to travel near as much as I would like to,
so hearing about your trips has been wonderful. I really don't have an
"exotic" location story but as shellers, perhaps some of you will smile with
my story as what we'll do to have an adventure to find shells... On my
first "real" shelling trip, to Eleuthera in 1988, I was having a wonderful
time just being with other shellers. One of my most memorable stories came
with our excursion to Surfer's Beach, on the Atlantic side of the island. We
had some basic directions but we were pretty much just winging it. Well, Asa
told us we could take the rental cars anywhere on the island, so we found
what looked like a road that would hopefully get us to the beach, or at
least close! The "road" was so narrow that our car scraped by all the bushes
and little trees. The air conditioning didn't work so we had the car windows
open.......some of the best shells I found that day I collected from inside
the car as they were knocked off the bushes as we passed by. I have slides
from inside the car and of the live snails crawling on the seats that I
have shown in my classroom.....if nothing else, my students get to see what
fun shell collecting can be!! Vicky Wall North Carolina
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