Hi Folks.

   Quite by chance I had the opportunity to meet a truly fascinating man.
Because I don't want any of his personal information to go out on the web,
I'll simply call him 'Bill'.  Anyway he was a former Geologist with all the
insight of a good scientists.  Further his work in oil has provided him with
the means to have the ability to build himself a sailboat, which he too from
the Bahamas down most of the Lesser Antilles over a two year period.  As a
diver he took his observational skills down with him.

   The first part I know well, the reefs in the Caribbean are in terrible
shape.  In most places out side of one location in the Bahamas where he was
still able to see healthy corals (he rattled off the scientific names of the
species including the two Stag-horn Corals but I wasn't fast enough to catch
it) he rarely found more than a few small patch reefs.

    Another things he described were the large living mollusks he saw. The
several Tritons (Charania) and 'other large mollusks' he saw (non-Strombus)
all had boring-sponge damage.  While he said that on previous trips he had
seen this on non-living shells he had never seen it on living specimens
before.  Also he stated that on his previous trips the large Conch he saw
(presumably Strombus gigas) were clean, the current living specimens he saw,
regardless of the island were covered in algae.

    My only personal observations in the Caribbean were in Belize, while I
saw the same level of coral reef damage the S. gigas I saw (as late as 2000)
looked pretty healthy.  That was the only large live Mollusk I saw in Belize.

    Anyway, my question with the sponge-damage is that stress related too?
Do living gastropods normally limit sponge damage but because of stresses
invite the boring-sponges to do more damage?  I suspect that he may not have
seen a large enough sample size on either of his trips to really make a case
for more mollusk damage now than in the past, but I thought it would be
worth a note to the group.

Thanks.

Doug

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