Scientists Play Matchmaker for Beloved Sea Snails in the Florida Keys

In the turquoise waters of the Florida Keys, a team of scientists is taking on a new role: they’re playing Cupid. As climate change warms the shoreline environment, a large sea snail known as the queen conch has been having trouble mating. Now, scientists are relocating these mollusks to cooler waters where they can find mates, reproduce and boost their population.

Changes in ocean temperature have made the queen conchs living close to shore ‘celibate,’ in a way. While the conchs in deeper, cooler waters are mating and living freely, those near the coast have stopped reproducing as their shallow habitat becomes subjected to temperature extremes, including summer heat.

“What happens is the energy they would normally put in reproduction gets shunted off into basically staying alive,” Gabriel Delgado, a researcher with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, tells the Miami Herald’s Alex Harris.

The problem is due in part to the gastropod’s low population, but also to infertility and lethargy caused by warming waters. Scientists found that the shallow-water conchs did not fully develop their reproductive organs, leaving them unable to repopulate the area.

So in June, the team of researchers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission placed 208 queen conchs in milk crates and moved them to an offshore herd, reports the Guardian’s Alex Harris. With declining conch numbers, Delgado and his team had depended on the public to identify queen conchs in the area. And eventually, with a group of community volunteers, they were able to successfully relocate the conchs. In mid-August, during the first of the team’s monthly checks of the new herd, the researchers were encouraged to see each of the conchs still there.

This isn’t the first time queen conchs have been relocated in Florida—at least two previous efforts happened in 1999 and 2000, and Delgado was involved in both. Scientists found that, once they were moved to cooler waters, the heat-stressed conchs bounced back quickly.

“This is a really unique and intelligent way of going about taking animals that aren’t part of the breeding population and helping increase the genetic diversity, presumably, and more importantly, the reproductive output,” says Andrew Kough, a research biologist at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, to WLRN’s Jenny Staletovich.

Queen conchs have a long history in the Florida Keys. The Indigenous Arawak people used their shells as ceremonial objects, musical instruments and tools, and European settlers used them in construction and for communication between ships. Today, Key West is known as the Conch Republic in homage to the creatures. But with the advent of scuba diving in the 1960s, people began harvesting the sea snails in much higher numbers.

In 2017, the Florida population of the iconic sea snail stood at 700,000 adult queen conchs. But after Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Ian in 2022, that number plummeted to 126,000, per the Miami Herald. The population also faces a constant threat from poaching—harvesting queen conchs in Florida has been illegal since the 1970s.

The herds need to have a high number of queen conchs, because the snails propel themselves using their single foot—they can’t move very far. For the aggregation of conchs to be successful, at least 200 conchs have to be present in a 2.5-acre area.

“I like to use the zombie apocalypse analogy here, where if there’s a zombie apocalypse and the last man’s in Canada and the last woman is in Australia, it’s going to take a while for those two people to find each other to repopulate humans,” Delgado tells WLRN.

Moving the conchs may not solve the problem long-term. The Florida Keys, and South Florida in general, are areas of concern for scientists in terms of ocean temperature. In July 2023, for example, a buoy off of Key Largo clocked a water temperature of 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit—as warm as a hot tub.

“If sea surface temperatures keep getting warmer, then yes, it’s a concern,” Delgado tells the Miami Herald. “These tropical species are already operating at their thermal tolerance limits. If you push it a little bit further, they don’t do well.”

For now, at least, Delgado’s main goals are to increase the health of Florida’s coral reef and bring the conch numbers back up. As he puts it, per the Miami Herald, the matchmaking scientists are putting “the conch back in the Conch Republic.”

Alexa Robles-Gil | | READ MORE

Alexa Robles-Gil is a bilingual science journalist based in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Undark, Inside Climate News and more.