In Reply to: DONT BUY SHELLS! and I do posted by aqua on Thursday, 1. February 2007 at 15:57 Bali Time:
but the shells on sale are already dead. It may be appropriate to have some kind of international agreement to control taking endangered shells across borders,[a bit like the international ban on ivory], but asking people in general not to buy them just won't have any effect.
We can buy bags of assorted Indian Ocean shells very cheaply in discount shops in the Perth area. Years ago, we bought some nautilus shells in Broome. It's probably happening everywhere, not just in Bali.
There's a very interesting shell which we've occasionally found on the beach in the Seminyak area. We considered ourselves lucky if we found just one per holiday. Then one time we were at Bali Cliff and saw an old man who had a bagful, which he had collected for food for his family. I thought afterwards that I should have offered to pay him for the empty shells. He probably had a truck full out the back of his house!
One time, I was snorkeling on the reef out from the Vienna Beach Hotel at Lipah village [Amed] and found a big spider shell. I showed it to my lady friend Emiko and then put it back where I found it, as it had a live animal inside. But I had no bad feelings about buying an already dead spider shell from one of the Sanur shops.