Dear All:
 
Someone sent me this article and I thought you all might get something out of
it.
 
Sarah Watson
 
 
 
Florida Conch Harvest Dries Up
 
.c The Associated Press
 
 By DAVID ROYSE
 
LONG KEY, Fla. (AP) -- The Conch Republic is conched out.
 
The mollusk meat in the conch chowder you can get at just about any restaurant
in the Florida Keys probably came from Jamaica or South America. There just
aren't enough conch left to harvest in the Florida Keys, despite its nickname
as the Conch Republic.
 
Bob Glazer and the state of Florida are trying to change that.
 
In giant tanks out behind the Keys Marine Lab crawl the snail-like animals --
pronounced ``konk'' -- that Glazer hopes to reintroduce to the waters around
the Keys.
 
There's more at stake than biological diversity.
 
This, after all, is the Conch Republic. The current situation is kind of like
a banana republic with no bananas.
 
The high school teams in Key West are known as the Conchs (the cheerleaders
are the Conchettes). Tourists ride around town on the Conch Train.
 
Babies born in the Keys get a Conch Republic birth certificate that says they
are officially Conchs. People who move to the Keys earn the right to be called
``freshwater conchs'' after seven years.
 
Glazer, who works for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, is a
freshwater conch. But he knows more about mollusca gastropoda strombidae
strombus gigas -- the Queen Conch -- than most of the natives. And he is
determined to bring the animal back.
 
In 1965, a quarter-million conch were harvested in the Keys, Glazer said.
 
Today there's a tiny fraction of that number in the water. Commercial
harvesting of conch has been banned in the Keys since 1975. Recreational
taking of the conch was outlawed in 1986.
 
It wasn't so much the quest for the tough meat served in chowder, conch
fritters, conch ceviche or cracked conch that led to the depletion of the
species in the Keys.
 
It was more the desire for the shell -- the large, familiar pink and white
shell that can double as a horn (and does every year during Key West's annual
conch shell blowing contest.) Many older buildings here are made of conch, as
are some roads. Countless shells have been sold to tourists.
 
If the population ever rebounded so harvesting could begin again, there would
be a market throughout the 110-mile island chain, said Judy Correa, who runs
the Key West Cafe Sole, where raw conch carpaccio -- made from Bahamas conch
-- is one of the most popular dishes.
 
The hatchery was opened in 1991 on Long Key. Since then, Glazer and his
colleagues have released about 6,000 conch into the wild and studied them to
determine whether laboratory-hatched conch can survive in the ocean. They tag
the animals with aluminum and use metal detectors to keep track of them.
 
The Keys aren't the only place where conch are having trouble.
Internationally, they are one step from being classified as threatened.
 
Jamaica has limited its season. Puerto Rico, Venezuela and the Turks and
Caicos islands all have hatcheries.
 
The hatcheries all have the same problem: Although they produce millions of
juveniles each year, their conch planting efforts are plagued by a high
mortality rate.
 
Researchers have to teach young conch to bury themselves in the sand to
protect themselves. The conch go through a week of predator school.
 
``We put the lobster in a cage so the conch can see it and smell it -- but the
lobster can't actually attack them,'' Glazer said.