Dear all,
 
I have also been following this thread with interest and some aprehension,
mostly because here at the Shell Museum we receive a great many collections
of locally collected shells. Many of these will include Indo-Pacific
cowries, cones, spider conchs, you name it. The Shell Museum also receives
a large number of requests for identification of exotic shells truly
collected on Sanibel. Casual collectors bring these locally collected,
exotic shells for identification all the time. Although the vast majority
of local shell collectors would never do it, I heard from a lady who told
me, wearing a mischievous smile, that she regularly scatters duplicate
exotic shells on the beach in front of her house, her own little
contribution to shell collecting. She watches for hours, she told, as
casual collectors stop, stoop, and gawk at their "new findings". From the
record-keeping, museum standpoint, having the beach spiced with showy,
exotic shells should not pose a big problem, because we all assume that
spider conchs are not found in the Atlantic Ocean at all, and will weed
these bad apples out of our record books. The problems for us start when we
find species that live in neighboring areas such as the Caribbean, Florida
Keys, east coast of Florida, etc., and that "should not be here" in the
first place. How do we know that that "new occurrence" on Sanibel of a
species that was never found before north of Florida Bay or the Upper Keys
is indeed a new occurrence and not part of a "just for fun" spicing event?
For that reason, we only inventory species that are found more than once,
in different sites and occasions.
 
Happy Thanksgiving from Sanibel,
 
Jose
__________________________________________________________________________
Jose H. Leal, Ph.D.
Director, The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum
Editor-in-chief, THE NAUTILUS
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http://www.uwp.edu/academic/biology/bmsm/bm_shell.htm
3075 Sanibel-Captiva Road
Sanibel, FL 33957 USA
(941) 395-2233; fax (941) 395-6706