Science Friday - Helping Queen Conchs Mate In The Florida Keys

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

In shallow water not far from the Florida Keys’ famed Seven Mile Bridge, a herd of the state’s flamboyantly pink queen conchs is struggling to survive.Warming seas and wild swings in temperature have shut down their reproductive impulses in the waist-deep water, leaving them to creep along the ocean floor, searching for food but not love. Meanwhile, just a few miles away in deeper, cooler waters, the iconic mollusks mate freely. So scientists have a rescue plan: load the inshore conchs into milk crates, ferry them to colonies in deep water, and let nature run its course.As climate change fastracks ocean warming, the researchers hope their plan hatches enough baby conchs to help boost the flagging population.“Once you put them in a more appropriate temperature regime, snails have a remarkable capability to heal themselves,” says Dr. Gabriel Delgado, a conch scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who is leading the pilot project. “Now you have a contributing member to future populations.”To read the rest of this article (plus see stunning images of conchs!) visit our website.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The queen conk is an iconic snail that lives in Caribbean waters. But the popularity of the shells and the tastiness of the meat led them to be overfished. It's Tuesday, July 16th, and this is Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Kathleen Davis. You may have seen the shell of a queen conk. They're shiny, pink, and orange, and they can be up to a foot long. Their populations have decreased dramatically over the years, So luckily, marine scientists in Florida and the Bahamas are hard at work to make sure Queen Conc thrive

into the future. Our next guest tagged along with some scientists who are doing this work, and she's here to tell us all about it. Jenny Stoletovich is the Environment Editor at WLRN in Miami, Florida. Jenny, welcome to Science Friday. Hey, thanks, Kathleen. It's great to be here. Great to have you. So tell us a little bit about Queen Conc. I mean, what is it like to be a Queen Conk these days? That's right. So in Florida, it means that you are probably pretty lonely. The state used to have this really booming population. That's why, like you said, the keys are called the conch republic. But the popularity of the shells and the tastiness of the meat led them to be overfished. That wiped out these big herds of conks and left these much smaller aggregations. And because there are so few, these slow-moving conks, you had a hard time finding each other, which meant that their numbers continued to drop. Okay, so you mentioned that the overfishing has been a problem. What else are their biggest threats? Right. So because they're not just overfished here in Florida, they were overfished everywhere. And that meant that the, what they call the larval train, which is basically the Caribbean-wide currents that carry baby conks from one place to another got interrupted. And when there were fewer supplies of babies, it caused not just our population to plummet, but others as well.

So there's that derailed larval train that's a problem. And then the other thing is climate change. As waters warm, scientists found that it's harder for conch to reproduce. And also hurricanes are more intense. A hurricane can carry huge amounts of sediment that actually bury the conk in the keys. When Hurricane Irma hit in 2017, it buried 80% of the conk that they were monitoring. and the number still hadn't rebounded when Ian hit in 2022. So combination of warm waters and more intense hurricanes are a big problem.

Okay, so you went on a boat with researchers and you helped play matchmaker for Queen Conk. So tell me what that experience was like. Right. So this is part of a year-long project by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to see if they can move these inshore conks in hotter water to deeper. cooler water can help boost the population. Back in 2000, they discovered that these inshore conks weren't reproducing. And they started to look into why. First, they thought that it had something to do with pollution because they were close to shore. And in the Keys, canals criss

cross the Keys. And that water is filled with dirt from or pollution from restaurants and industrial uses. The keys relied on leaky septic tanks until recently. And so all that pollution washed in the canals, but it turned out that it was not pollution. And so then they opened up the conchs to look at their brains and discovered that they seemed to be chronically stressed, and they connected that to this hotter water. So I went out with this conch scientist Gabriel Delgado and his colleagues at the state's lab in Marathon, which is not that far from. the seven-mile bridge that connects the upper keys to the lower keys. And it was a really windy and chubby day.

So if memory serves, they're going to be in this shallow area over here. So it was about a 15-minute, very bumpy boat ride to this small key near the bridge where they'd scouted out some conks. There were two boats there. And so the scientists jumped off the boats, got in the water, and snorkeled over the shallow water where they loaded up about 40 adult conks that they'd found in big blue milk crate. Oh, wow. Okay, so how do you actually like set up these conks reproductively? Is there like a compatibility test that you do or something like that? So they actually don't seem to very, be very picky about

hooking up. The only requirement they have is that they be close together. They don't move very far, maybe six to ten feet during the day. So if they're, if they're too spread out, they can't find each other. So that's one of the things that they're going to do with this relocation is put the conks closer together offshore and deeper water and see if they can get the population to rebound. One of the things they want to look at is if the relocated conks actually get along with their new companions or if they're going to wander away or if they have some kind of homing instinct and try and get back to where they were found, although in the keys, that's going to be kind of difficult because there's a deep channel that separates the inshore and the offshore

conks and the conks use a foot to kind of pull vault their way along the bottom, and if it's too mucky, then they can't move. So did these scientists figure out why the temperature made the conks stop reproducing? Well, they think that it's essentially chronic stress, that they have a reproductive season in the spring, and the big swings in the temperature shorten that season. So, you know, in the wintertime, it's cool and they shut down and don't reproduce. As spring arrives, they kind of, their brains kickstart and the hormones get going and they start reproducing. But with warming oceans and also the extremes and temperature, they're having a shorter reproductive season. And so here's basically what Delgado said when I talked to him at his lab.

Our current theory as to why Near Shore Conc are reproductive andly inactive is that they have a truncated reproductive season. So what he says basically is this Goldilocks spring season is just too short and that climate change is shifting that. The other thing, too, is that water in the Gulf of Mexico is warming faster than the global average. One study found that it was twice as fast. And those inshore conks, the water there is heavily influenced by the Gulf and Florida Bay, whereas the offshore conks are closer to the Gulf Stream, which is, you know, a fast-moving current. So the water there gets flushed more and it's cooler. Okay. So when you were on this boat trip with these researchers, what did you guys find? Did you find good news for the Queen Conk?

Well, so again, going back to 2000, they did find success when they moved conk some initially. They had moved about 400 back then. And within a few months, they started reproducing and the herd started growing. At that point, that's when they pivoted, trying to figure out what it was that was causing it. So now that they know what they're going to do is run kind of a pilot. study. When we went out, it was the first time they had moved the conks. So they've got like three populations of conk offshore. And they're going to measure the difference between the herds that have conks added and those that don't. And they've got some retirees and students helping out. And over the next year, they'll see what happens. They think that they'll get good results. But that's, you know, one of the things they're going to have to test and see. Are there potential pitfalls to this strategy? I mean, I can't imagine that the oceans are going to get much cooler. Right. So that is the problem is that ocean heat is not going away. And before they did

this project, they looked at some data that the University of Miami collected on ocean hotspots. So while we have kind of globally oceans warming off the coast of Florida, there are also these hot spots. And that study forecast those to spread, which has got Delgado worried. Here's what he said when I asked him about it. If those trends continue and our sources become affected like near-shore conch are there's the issue. Okay, so we've talked about what is going on in Florida. What kind of techniques are happening elsewhere to bring back the queen conk? Yeah, so in some places like the Turks and Caicos, they've set up a fishing season with limits.

You know, the Turks and Caicos imports a huge amount of conk to the U.S. So it's a really important fishery for conks. But other places have not, like the Dominican Republic and Haiti and Honduras, Those numbers have plummeted, and conch imports are banned in some of those places to try and control the fishery. In the Bahamas, they're looking at expanding marine preserves to protect the reproductive populations. They've done studies to look at where the most reproductive populations are and what kind of boundaries they should set up around those populations or what kind of fishing limits that they should put into place. What's complicated is that, you know, as I've just explained, the fish. rules are really varied. And that gets back to this idea of the larval train to and how this

population is really interconnected. I mean, we're talking about Florida Carks, but really they're part of this Caribbean-wide population that relies on each other to keep everybody healthy. So a few years ago, some scientists with the Shet Aquarium discovered a huge population off Kaysal Bank in the Bahamas, which has made them really hopeful because it was, way bigger than they expected. And if that is a really healthy reproductive population, they could help replenish that larval train. Yeah, let's cross our fingers about that. So as we've talked about a little bit, Queen Conc aren't just beautiful and iconic, but people also eat them. Is it possible to balance conservation with farming and fishing?

I mean, that is a question that the Bahamas is trying to figure out right now because it is such a big draw to tourism, and it's the national dish of the Bahamas. In Florida, there are too few to harvest, and this year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration actually increased their status to threaten because the population is so small and because the threats from climate change are increasing. So they've looked at trying to set up conk farms and harvesting conk, but they have not had much success with that. And so now Florida Atlantic University and Now are actually taking a second look at those farming practices and is there a better way to set up a hatchery? There's a test lab in Puerto Rico right now. The goal of that is to release 2,000 conks into

the wild if they can successfully reproduce those conks in the lab. Jenny Stoledovich is the Environment Editor at WLRN in Miami, Florida. Jenny, thanks so much for telling us all about the Queen Conc. Well, thanks for having me. And if you want to read more about this story and see some really beautiful images of Queen Conc. Go to our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash conk. That's C-O-N-C-H. That's all the time that we have for now.

A lot of folks help make the show happen this week, including Jordan Smudjik, Charles Bergquist, George Harper, Emma Gomez, Sandy Roberts, Robin Casmer, and many more. Tomorrow we'll talk about why the small intestine may be the key to understanding gut health, but for now,

I'm SciFry producer Kathleen Davis. Stay cool out there.