You've probably all seen those little baskets of $3 or $5 Filipino shells,
sold in seaside souvenir shops, worldwide.

That, quite frankly, doesn't do a lot of harm to conservation. The shells
are usually hugely abundant, and almost all of them are dead, beach-found
shells - it is simply too much trouble to clean out live-caught corpses.

So, don't worry too much about those, so far as real conservation goes.
Those little baskets keep a lot of the people who make them up get enough
of a rice ration to live.

If there were people out there who would buy pea pods, I'm sure someone
would be hanging around the trash cans at the Birdseye frozen pea factory
right now.

regards

Richard Parker
Siargao Island, The Philippines.

My website at www.coconutstudio.com is about the island and its people,
coastal early humans, fishing, coconuts, bananas and whatever took my
fancy at the time.

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