Greetings Andy,
Coincidently, I sat next to an archeologist on the plane from Santiago to
Easter Island. He told me that he had be doing much of the research and
restoration on Easter Island for the past 30 years. I talked to him about
shelling and asked about land snails. He told me he had indeed discovered a
fossil land snail on Easter Isalnd. I asked out of curiosity for a friend
who is into land shells. Because, land shells are not in my area of
interest, I failed to pursue it. Now I wish I had.
All the best,
Paul Kanner
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Rindsberg" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 7:14 AM
Subject: Re: Remote places
> 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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