Before I say what I want to say on this subject, let me first state that I fully support the idea of responsible collecting, and minimizing one's impact on the environment, whether one is collecting shells, cross country skiing, boating, hiking, or picnicing. I do return rocks to their original positions, I don't drop litter on the beach, and I do carry a plastic bag with me, to pick up other people's litter that I find while I am collecting. Having said that, I also think that the situation has to be viewed in perspective. The amount of damage one diver can do on one tank of air by manually breaking coral heads might look like devastation to someone swimming behind him, but in an aerial view of the reef, his "swath of destruction" would look like a bug bite on an elephant. And like the bug bite, it would heal within a short time, as the newly exposed undersides of rocks or coral heads became repopulated with organisms. Someone earlier today described the recovery of shelling in an area where hundreds of square miles were totally devastated by hurricane winds. That recovery took several years, and no wonder - that was the equivalent of skinning the elephant. If the environment can recuperate from a swath a hundred miles wide and a thousand miles long, how long will it take to heal a scratch 3 feet wide and a hundred feet long? That is not a justification for irresponsible collecting - but it is a reason not to overreact to the few individuals who do plow their way through the environment as though it were their personal property. What they do isn't nice - it isn't wise. Maybe it isn't even ethical. But no single person is going to seriously damage a reef, a beach, or a tidal flat, no matter what they do while they are there. If nature were that fragile, it would have ceased to exist long ago. I also fully support the idea of sanctuaries where wildlife of all kinds can live as free from human harassment as possible. But making silly laws like 2 specimens per species per collector per day doesn't do much to help the environment. It just just creates the impression, accurate or not, that the people who drafted the legislation are genuinely concerned about environmental issues. They can say they did something - why worry about whether it was something useful? If a person can locate 10 specimens while walking a transect along a section of beach or reef, that is proof positive that thousands of specimens are present (again, consider the aerial view, the bigger picture). Whether the person takes two specimens and leaves the other eight, or collects all ten is utterly irrelevant to the welfare of the ecosystem. Of course, if there were ten thousand people on the reef, the difference between 2 per person and 10 per person might have some impact - but conchology just hasn't caught on to that extent yet. Let's hope it never does! Another consideration - while you are trying to decide which two of your five Pectens to keep, and dutifully turning over stones, that commercial trawler on the horizon is scouring a swath along the bottom, fourty or fifty feet wide and three or four miles long. Nothing that it overturns is being replaced. And the ten or twenty tons of scallops being harvested are all being kept. Yet, even the swath created by the trawler will soon heal, provided the creation of such damage is controlled - now there's a place where regulation makes sense - a lion attacking our environmental elephant, not a mosquito. Unfortunately, politicians are not well equipped to tackle a complex problem that is essentially scientific in scope. So the tendency is often to underregulate what needs regulation, and to overregulate what does not. The greatest threats of all to the marine environment come from the land, not the sea. The intertidal marine environment recovers from storm damage, commercial fishing, and even million gallon oil spills. But it does not recover from industrial pollution and agricultural runoff, which is a constant destructive force rather than a sporadic one. Throw poison on the elephant and it may recover - throw poison on it hourly around the clock for a week, or a month, or a year, and sooner or later it's going to die - just as many reefs have. But in the meantime, let's get our legislators to make sure that the people on the beach in front of the fertilizer factory only take two periwinkles apiece. Yes, it annoys me when people don't turn rocks back. Often my conscience makes me do it for them. Sometimes I pick up a newspaper that someone has dropped on the sidewalk too. But not because I think the local ecosystem will self-destruct if I don't. Just because I think it's the right thing to do. Paul M.