No one appreciates the morbidity of seashells. I guess because they’re too different from our own remains. It’s like if a gastropod race filled buckets with skulls for their babies to play with or make into bracelets.
PUTTING THIS ON THE RIGHT POST (I accidentally reblogged the butterfly post before, lol)
…..I think a lot of people also just don’t realize that a seashell represents a dead animal because they think snails might “shed” them or “molt” them or otherwise have some ability to discard a shell and live; I’ve even met people who think *turtles* can abandon their shells!!
Holy shit tho I just googled and found this on wiki:
“ Empty seashells are often picked up by beachcombers. However, the majority of seashells which are offered for sale commercially have been collected alive (often in bulk) and then killed and cleaned, specifically for the commercial trade.[1] This type of large-scale exploitation can sometimes have a strong negative impact on local ecosystems, and sometimes can significantly reduce the distribution of rare species. “
So they’re not even collecting washed up shells, they’re just straight up hunting and killing mollusks for their shells.
Sadly, yes.
But collecting too many from the beach isn’t great for the ecosystem either! A wild natural beach is often almost as much seashell as it is sand, and all those shells provide habitat for trillions of tiny enough organisms and algae that provide countless other organisms a steady food supply. Life evolved around shell-covered beaches for millions of years, but almost every beach accessible to humans is now kept so constantly clean that it’s completely changed how those ecosystems work.
