Long Live the Queen Conch
Queen conch is charismatic, delicious and in trouble. A Florida scientist has a plan to grow the wild Caribbean population while supporting the fishery, but some say it鈥檚 not enough.
- By Bill Rhodes
- Conservation
- Jun 25, 2025
Queen conch, such as this one in the Bahamas, have two moveable eyestalks, a mouth at the end of a tube, a single foot and a shell harder than concrete. (Photo by Shane Gross)
GENTLE WAVES lap the white Antiguan sand as the putt-putt of an outboard motor approaches. A small crowd of curious hotel guests draws around the wooden skiff as it beaches with two local men onboard. One lifts a mesh bag filled with the kind of shells found in tourist shops throughout the Caribbean: roughly the size of a football, whorled, with a bright pink interior. But these shells’ insides are fleshy and alive.
A woman asks what they’re for. One of the men grins, slices off a piece of fresh conch meat with his knife and pops it in his mouth. “We sell them,” he says. “They’re delicious!” He offers her a bite, which she accepts before the men putt off in search of more potential customers.
Widely considered excellent table fare, frequently shows up on menus in the southeastern United States as conch fritters, conch chowder, and sometimes sushi or ceviche. The harvest in Key West, Florida, alone reached 250,000 conch a year in the 1960s. But as fishers, scientists and regulators noted population declines, Florida placed a moratorium on the fishery in 1978 followed by a total ban in 1985.
Still, the United States remains the largest importer of queen conch, accounting for some 80 percent of the annual Caribbean harvest from countries including Honduras, Belize and Jamaica. the publication Seafoodnews citing U.S. Census data, that amounted to about 2,250,000 pounds of meat from January to April 2024—a 13.5 percent decrease compared to the same period the prior year, and yet our appetite isn’t falling fast enough. In February 2024, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) listed the queen conch as under the Endangered Species Act.
Wherever it’s found, conch means more than its dollar value. “High schools name their teams after the queen conch,” says Gabriel Delgado, a research scientist formerly with the . “Someone born on the Keys is called a saltwater conch, while someone who has moved in is called a freshwater conch—and this is despite the fact that there has been no commercial or recreational fishing for conch there for 40 years.”
Outside of U.S. waters, the reliance runs even deeper, with conch appearing on the coats of arms for the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. “Entire local communities throughout the Caribbean are built around their harvest and sale,” says , a research professor at Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) . “They are beautiful animals and hugely important members of the marine ecosystem—and they are delicious and nutritious. I simply can’t imagine a world where queen conch no longer exist.” Davis is trying to ensure that day never comes.
Empty shells pile up in the Bahamas (above), where conch is the national food. A Bahamian boy (below) sorts conch for sale.
Overfished and under threat
The largest herbivorous marine snail in the Western Hemisphere, the queen conch (Aliger gigas) diverged from other species in the fossil record about 40 million years ago. A gastropod with a single, muscular foot, the conch lives up to 30 years in the wild and grows to about 12 inches in length. Its well-camouflaged shell, often sporting algae picked up from its travels, protects two eyes that sit atop eyestalks. While its range stretches from the Caribbean Sea through the Florida Keys to Bermuda, the conch prefers shallower water, ideally 5 to 30 feet deep, with an abundance of seagrass coated in epiphytes—its primary food source besides algae.
The conch diet can be a bellwether for the marine environment. Not only do conch need healthy seagrass in shallow water, “the temperature of the water will greatly influence their hatching and growth,” Davis says of egg and larval conch, which prefer a range of 77 to 88 degrees F. “When pollution kills the grasses and global warming raises water temperatures, the queen conch populations suffer, which often is directly associated with the demise of adjacent coral reefs.”
Queen conch reach sexual maturity between ages 3 and 4. After mating in aggregate, females lay hundreds of thousands of eggs up to nine times a year on the seafloor, where they mature and hatch on their own. Life isn’t easy from there. Facing predators from small fish to octopuses, loggerhead sea turtles and spiny lobsters as they grow, the conch’s mortality rate is exceedingly high. “It takes 4,000 larvae to yield one sexually mature adult,” says , a research biologist with the in Chicago. Considering that seven adult conch yield just over 2 pounds of meat and “the vast amount of conch being harvested over the years, it is no wonder that the wild populations have declined,” he says.
Banned in Florida and the federal waters around Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, conch fishing is legal but regulated in the territorial waters around those islands. According to NOAA, were taken from these waters in 2021. Limited seasons, commercial quotas and size limits are in place, designed to curtail overfishing. Puerto Rico, for example, introduced a harvest limit in 1996 of 300 conch per day per vessel for the nine-month season, and the entire harvest is intended for consumption on the island.
Reports of overfishing and habitat destruction began circulating beyond Florida as early as the 1960s, and in 1992, the (CITES) listed queen conch as at risk of becoming extinct without trade controls. The United States and 32 Caribbean nations—excluding Haiti, Anguilla, and Turks and Caicos—signed CITES and are expected to follow its regulations, including obtaining permits to export conch and implementing programs to prevent species decline.
But Davis, Delgado and others say regulations are hard to enforce in a fishery made up of small boats that may or may not report their catches. While NOAA estimated the total Caribbean queen conch population at 740 million to 1 billion in 2022, the agency found overfishing had left individual conch so spread out, they’re struggling to successfully aggregate and mate.
Climate change poses another threat. According to a March 2025 published in Science Advances, the frequency of storms this century is predicted to be the greatest it has been for almost 6,000 years. “I have studied the queen conch’s recovery for 20 years now,” Delgado says of the Florida population. “Yes, we have seen it slowly recover and grow, but natural disasters, like hurricanes, will decimate populations. It is a case of taking two steps forward and one step back.” Before Hurricane Irma in 2017, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission put the number of adult conch in the Keys around 700,000. Before Hurricane Ian in 2022, that number had dipped as low as 126,000—hence NOAA’s decision to declare the conch at moderate risk of extinction in the next 30 years without significant intervention.
Megan Davis (above) visits a queen conch nursery in the Bahamas. Technician Lachelle Russell (below) feeds larval queen conch in the Grand Bahamas mobile lab.
Upwardly mobile
Enter Davis, the unofficial conch queen. Davis came by her interest in marine environments as a young girl, collecting shells on her native Australian beaches. Upon immigrating to the United States at age 6, she spent summers with her family sailing the Bahamas, cementing her love for the Caribbean and the queen conch.
“I vividly remember meeting conch fishers as a teenager,” she says, “and I was just awed with the conch’s beauty, its importance to the fishermen and their lives and, to be totally honest, how good it tasted.” Davis helped establish the first commercial conch farm in Turks and Caicos in 1984, growing up to 1 million conch per year. After earning her Ph.D. from the Florida Institute of Technology, she joined Harbor Branch and in 2019 initiated the FAU Harbor Branch , funded through federal and foundation grants and philanthropic gifts.
That same year, Davis and FAU entered an agreement with in Naguabo, Puerto Rico, to build their first partner lab. The San Juan lab launched with a twofold goal: to restore the island’s conch population and to generate a source of income for conch fishers and their communities via sustainable aquaculture. The lab would endeavor to grow conch to sufficient maturity so the animals could be released into the sea, helping replenish wild populations.
“There are 1,200 commercial fishers [in Puerto Rico], with 800 of them diving to collect conch, lobster and spearfish for their own use and sale in local markets,” says Raimundo Espinoza, Conservación ConCiencia’s founder. “We felt it was important to both conch conservation and [the fishers’] livelihoods to explore ways to replenish queen conch in local waters.”
Aquaculture, or raising fish and shellfish for commercial sale and consumption, has grown substantially in recent decades. According to a 2024 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , “while capture fisheries production has remained largely unchanged for decades, aquaculture has increased by around 7 percent since 2020, contributing over 57 percent of aquatic animal products used for direct human consumption,” with mollusks accounting for 20 percent of all annual aquatic animal production. But the queen conch posed some particularly spiky challenges for captive breeding and rearing, given its multistage life cycle, its narrow temperature tolerance and its need for unpolluted seawater.
Once independent efforts across a bevy of interests—biological research, conservation, for-profit fisheries—cleared those hurdles, Davis and her team went a step further. They reasoned that the best way to support their offshore partners was to build, equip and ship self-contained mobile labs to far-flung locations, where locals, including conch fishers, could receive training to manage the rearing process.
The initial mobile lab was created in partnership with the and installed in Great Exuma, Bahamas, in 2023. Today there are eight mobile labs in operation—four in the Bahamas, two in Puerto Rico, one in Jamaica and one in Florida—that cultivate queen conch on land from egg masses to juveniles, at which point the conch are released into the wild.
Each mobile lab consists of a 20-by-8-foot trailer fitted with saltwater rearing tanks and filtration systems. Solar powered with backup batteries to ensure continuous operation, each is capable of growing up to 2,000 conch per year and costs between $150,000 to $180,000 at startup—typically paid for by local grants or donations and run by nonprofits. Conservación ConCiencia, in Puerto Rico, is supported by both NOAA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (Like Davis herself, FAU, as a research institution, has no commercial interest in the labs or local harvests.) The Puerto Rico labs have “released thousands of larvae per year and are now raising conch to 2 to 3 years of age and releasing [a few dozen per year] to a marine protected area,” with goals of releasing 5,000 to 10,000 conch per year by 2028, Espinoza says.
NOAA has seen the endeavor as an investment in conservation. “Through aquaculture, queen conch can be fished without removing individuals from the wild,” reads a statement on the agency’s website. “Farmed queen conch could potentially be used in the future to restock wild populations.”
Espinoza agrees. “Not only are we creating jobs, but we are educating local fishers to the life cycle of the conch, which makes them better and more respectful when harvesting,” he says of the Conservación ConCiencia lab.
Benefits extend throughout the local economy, says Carlos Velazquez, president of Puerto Rico’s 26-member Naguabo Fishing Association and owner of the Kadmiel fish market. “After the last hurricane hit the island, we lost many conch,” he says. “Knowing that we could work to restore them was important for us.” Likewise, Velazquez says local fishers see the value in tighter government regulations. “The three-month closed season is obeyed by all, and we understand that making sure conch survive is important to everyone’s livelihood. Without queen conch to fish for, our community would suffer greatly. Many men would be out of work and have nothing to do to earn money for their families.”
When the conch become juveniles, they are released into the wild.
But first, habitat
Not everyone sees captive breeding and release as the answer. Allan Stoner, senior scientist of the Bahamas-based nonprofit , worries the mobile labs offer governments “false hope” and a reason to keep fishing at unsustainable levels. “Aquaculture has a role, but it is not a panacea. The real key is getting ahead of the threat, managing existing wild stock to ensure it either stabilizes or grows over time. This requires field biology, monitoring and government intervention through regulation,” he says, though he agrees local job-training “offers great potential for outreach and education and is valuable in that way toward conch conservation.”
With other scientists, Kough and Stoner published a January in the journal Oryx on aquaculture as a means of restoring native populations. Their conclusion, for now: “Queen conch aquaculture is useful for scientific inquiry, community engagement and education, but not for stock enhancement or population restoration without more practical and cost-efficient options.”
Michiel van Nierop, who helped the start a queen conch hatchery for which Davis and her lab serve as scientific advisors, concurs. “Rearing and releasing juvenile conch is simply not enough without the added emphasis on fisheries management and regulation enforcement,” he says. “Here in Curaçao, the conch fishery is depleted not just because of overfishing and poaching, but also because of habitat destruction, mostly from pollution caused by busy ports and development along the shallower bays, and the subsequent destruction of the turtle grass and other seagrasses.”
Habitat restoration and the conch fishery are both critical and require government regulation and investment, but one supersedes the other, per Kough and his co-authors. The “ecosystem condition is typically more important than aquaculture release; thus, rebuilding habitats and effective controls on harvest should be in place prior to restoration aquaculture,” they write.
Davis believes the best route forward is to pursue as many paths as possible. “There is no single ‘right approach’ to reversing the plight of the queen conch,” she says. “It is a multifaceted problem that deserves a multifaceted solution.”
Espinoza agrees. “If you ask a local conch fisher, he will tell you conch are as plentiful now as 10 years ago, but we know that is not true, and certainly not throughout the Caribbean,” he says. “But we have also found that, as they learn more about the queen conch and its life cycle, the more observant and careful ... they become. They will not take a conch while she is laying eggs, for example, and avoid taking younger individuals now that they understand the conch’s precarious situation and complex life. After all, they want to provide for their families and safeguard their source of income.”
For her part, Davis will continue to do what she can. “I have made studying, rearing and returning the queen conch to sustainable levels my life’s work,” she says. “Communities depend on harvesting them for food and sale; tourists love to eat them; and when those things come together, it is not surprising that more are taken out than can grow back. That inevitably leads to where we are today, one step away from extinction. I don’t want that to happen.”
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A writer and retired life sciences executive, Bill Rhodes splits his time between southwest Florida and upstate New York.
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