In 1971, the Great Outdoors Publishing Co. of St. Petersburg introduced what would become one of its most popular guidebooks, a slim volume called How to Clean Seashells.
The author, a Canadian-born radioman named Eugene Bergeron, had caught the shell-collecting fever down in Florida when he and the century were both in their late teens. Working the nightshift for Tropical Radio Telegraph Co., he’d spend his days hunting seashells along both coasts. Then he joined the Navy and collected throughout the Pacific: The Admiralty Islands. The Philippines. Pearl Harbor, where he found the best shells on the leper colony of Molokai.
Bergeron loved shells as much as anyone. And he could apparently slaughter their animal architects better than anyone.
How to Clean Seashells might have been better titled How to Kill Mollusks. Until late in the 20th century, most every shell book and guide advised that, in the words of the 1961 How and Why Wonder Book of Seashells for children: “To get the best shells, you must bring ‘em back alive.”
Ocean-loving families, mine included, would not just bring back conchs, whelks and olive shells alive, but plunge them into bleach alive, freeze them alive and boil them alive. Not to consume the meat – a smelly burden to discard — but to hoard the shells. In his guide book Collectible Florida Shells, the renowned malacologist R. Tucker Abbott recommended that a two-minute boil for delicate specimens, or 30 minutes for heartier ones “will kill the animal, which can then be removed with forceps or tweezers by applying a steady, twisting motion so that the entire animal comes free.”
Some guides recommended burying live shells in ant piles for a few days. Let ants be helpful for a change, observed A.P.H. Oliver in the 1975 Hamlyn Guide to Shells of the World. “A bent piece of wire is often the final answer,” Oliver also wrote, after waxing that all mollusks have a brain, lay eggs and sometimes even sit on their eggs.
Bergeron’s guidebook was novel for its techniques honed to different species: Refrigeration for conchs, whose body could then be extracted with a strong pointed tool, and for cowries, which could be picked out with a dissecting needle. A nut pick for tun shells. Alcohol for whelks and murex. Chitons should be mummified in sturdy tape to keep them from rolling up, as they do when dying. Hermit crabs in a coveted shell should be plunged in freshwater with a little Clorox: “The little crab will crawl out of his shell and die in a very short time.”
He did not recommend muriatic acid, but so many collectors insisted on it that he included instructions on how to tie the shell to a string and lower it into the acid bath.
My Florida book-dealer friend Dotti Delfino, aka The Book Chaser, says old guides to sea life are highly collectible, especially those like Bergeron’s with visuals that illustrate shells or fish and how they were caught, cleaned and eaten. What I like about them is the reminder of how much environmental ethics can change in just a generation or two. In my childhood, motels on shell haven Sanibel Island had special boiling stations. In 1994, Sanibel became the first municipality to ban live shelling. Today, many of the motels post reminders to take only empty shells. At The Island Inn’s shell-cleaning station, a cartoon gastropod in flip flops reminds visitors: “Don’t take us home if we are still alive!”
Sanibel’s Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum is helping forge the new ethic. At the big touch tank, kids can peer into the curious, stalk-top eyes of the misnamed Florida Fighting Conch, or watch a moon snail bury itself in the sand for protection. Trained volunteer “shell ambassadors” walk the beach and answer visitors’ questions about shells and the lives of the animals that make them. The museum’s bookstore shelves are stocked with guides to living creatures on living beaches, and books on the ethos of keeping them that way.
It’s a profound shift since the many 1970s and ’80s reprints of Bergeron’s macabre little guide. Since then, ethical beachcombers have saved countless mollusks from death by boiling or acid wash.
The irony is that mollusks now face the same essential fate in their ocean home.
The seas have absorbed 90 percent of the heat generated by human-caused C02 emissions, and 30 percent of the C02 itself. As a result, climate change has started killing marine life, including coral reefs, by heating and acidifying the sea. Some of the tiniest shells are already beginning to dissolve in oceans that are a third more acidic today than during the Industrial Revolution.
The threat is “orders of magnitude larger” than all the shell collectors of human history, says malacologist José H. Leal, science director and curator at the Bailey-Matthews museum.
The old shell books and guides are gentle nostalgia by comparison. They are also black-and-white proof that we can change.
Florida shell lover on your holiday shopping list? The best modern guides, according to both the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum and reference librarian Candy Heise at the Sanibel Public Library, are these by naturalists Blair and Dawn Witherington:
Florida’s Seashells: A Beachcombers Guide (Second edition, Pineapple Press, 2017)
Florida’s Living Beaches: A Guide for the Curious Beachcomber (Second edition, Pineapple Press, 2017)
This article appears in Dec 14-21, 2017.