Philippines - Tangle Netting - Report 4? or 5? from Siargao Island

We're back in business on the tangle netting, after a few months being
otherwise occupied.

Serious collectors can skip the first 11 paragraphs, which are only chat and
a small ecological story with a moral.

The tangle netting project was slightly interrupted by my opening 'the Pub',
a combined restaurant and bar, in early June. It was supposed to be a
relaxing hobby, complementary to lazing around and collecting shells, but
turned out to be rather different. I rented the place from Pirate Pete. He's
a psychopathic and alcoholic Australian Vietnam War veteran, quite crazy,
and inclined to be somewhat angry and violent, usually for no good reason at
all.

Those of you who want to find out more (if there are any) about my various
culture clashes with drunken Australians, Filipinos, New Zealanders, the
occasional (and very civilised by comparison) Americanos, and even some
English, can buy my forthcoming book, 'The Pirate and The Publican'. One of
Rupert Murdoch's companies has promised to publish it, but only if I jazz it
up with a few more sexy bits.

The last six months have passed in a more a or less continuous alcoholic
haze, brought about by the wholesale price of  the
local beer at just 17¢ a bottle. My wholly commendable publican's desire to
keep up with my customers brought about excessive alcoholic consumption, so
the physiologists among you will understand why the sexy bits are taking a
little time to recollect or even invent.

I also suffered almost constant fatigue, caused by regular battles with
Pirate Pete, involving even the employment of an armed guard with a cradled
M-16 on the upper balcony for a time. 'the Pub' opened daily at 6:00AM for
the first taker for Surfer's Superfry, an amazingly huge breakfast which we
never got right because none of us was quite awake, but was very popular,
and closed that night at 2:00AM. I am still trying to catch up with the
sleep I started losing in June.

I closed the Pub last week - a highly sophisticated economical study showed
me that entertaining my friends with free beer would be a lot less costly
than trying to employ Filipino staff to sell it. When I found that even I
couldn't eat the food they cooked and  I was trying to sell, I realised it
was time to give up, and spend my time just idling and collecting seashells.

Alimang spent the summer planting agar-agar, which was the latest fad here.
It's a seaweed, with fat, stick-like branches. Somewhere in the First World,
someone processes it into a miracle ingredient, that stuff which makes ice
cream soft but not gloppy, makes lipstick spreadable, etc. You've almost
certainly just eaten some if you've had any kind of processed food.

All you had to do was tie a branch of it to a piece of rope, sink it about 2
metres, and wait for it to quintuple in weight. It was almost a genuine
pyramid scheme - lots of money for very little effort. The whole lagoon was
soon filled with lengths of sunken rope, which were a peril to navigation,
and stopped a lot of the local lads from going out to fish every day.

Alimang enlarged his house by a few sheets of plywood, from one room to
four, bought an expensive new boat engine, and grew himself a prosperous
looking pot belly.

So he wasn't very interested in going out at dusk, and again in the cold
dawn, to set and pull up my net from around 100 metres down (we only have
one now, the other was stolen early one morning, six months ago). What I
could pay him for that was a lot less than he could earn every day just by
sitting looking out to sea, tying a few more bits of agar-agar to a rope,
and watching his seaweed farm grow.

And not a lot of people went out fishing, when seaweed farming was a great
deal easier. Seaweed, even if it is an essential ingredient of ice cream and
Miracle Whip, is not very sustaining. It has almost no nutrition value at
all, although it can keep your iodine levels high. It's good as a salad,
with a little lemon juice, but that gets boring after a while.

The days when I could buy sailfish and marlin, Spanish mackerel, yellowfin
tuna, squid, cuttlefish, lobster, prawns, crabs, and a whole bunch of
delicious fish you've probably never even tasted fresh, for ridiculously low
prices from the local beachside market, have become less and less. It's been
a classical example of over-exploitation of a small common resource. What
kind of respectable fish wants to spend its days bumping into ropes and bits
of slimy seaweed?

About half the agar-agar has begun to suffer from a new and quite
incomprehensible (or curable) disease, which shrunk it, and the market price
went down anyway. The lagoon is now filled with lengths of rope, with no
seaweed, but it is still quite
difficult to take a boat out.

So Alimang's deep sea tangle netting has only just recommenced, but he's
done well. He goes out to Dinakpan, just outside the reef, about 70-100
metres deep, drops the net, line fishes a bit, and then brings it back the
next morning.

(I have to say, after the petty pilferage, cash losses, etc, that happened
in the Pub, I have been a little suspicious of the local
people. Alimang used to bring the daily catch to me in a glass jar, and I
suspected he was splitting just one catch over 2 or 3 days, but now he
brings the net to shore, and we untangle the damned thing together. Quite
often, there's just nothing in it, but coralline weed and rocks, with a few
small crabs).

In the last month or so, we have caught:

- A couple of nice Chicoreus rossiteri (or saltatrix), bright red
- A small pale-coloured Chicoreus superbus
- A very nice Conus bullatus, fully adult and good colour
- Three reasonable sized and complete Spondylus regius,(I think) - reddish,
with beautifully foliate curly spines. The book says these are juvenile, but
they're the same size or even bigger than some dead, single valves which
have fully developed spines.
- Two other smaller spondylus, with 'hairy' spines, but a bit too small to
identify properly
- A Spondylus sinensis, quite large, very encrusted indeed, but underneath,
a very beautiful comboination of orange yellow and red.
- A superb Fusinus longissimus - a beautiful creamy colour
- A cowrie which I got quite excited about - with a bright red animal, a
golden dorsum, lavender spots on the side, and orange teeth. But Springsteen
and Leobrera say Cypraea chinensis can be found all over the Philippines.
Obviously, it's very difficult to catch a rounded smooth shell in a net
which has to be hauled up from 100 metres down
without it falling out on the way up, so anything is welcome.

- A Mitre which I can't identify, and a strange Colubraria
- The first whole Ctenocardia victor
- A few more Cymatium gutturnium and 'moniliferum' - the first has a
flesh-pink aperture, and hairy tufts on the shoulder nodules, whereas the
second has a white aperture, and is quite bald.
- A whole bunch of little pointy, dead and faded cones, which I cannot
identify

The Spondylus are quite difficult to identify. I found another one, from a
submarine cave, but none of the books has anything like it. We have found a
couple of Spondylus imbutus upper valves, and of course most of the
Spondylidae we actually catch are very dead single valves, but there's hope
yet.


Regards to all

Richard Parker
Siargao Island, NE Mindanao, The Philippines
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