Loving the Chambered Nautilus to Death

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25nautilus.html?_r=1&smid=fb-nytimes&WT.mc_id=SC-SM-E-FB-SM-LIN-LTC-102511-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: October 24, 2011

It is a living fossil whose ancestors go back a half billion years — to the early days of complex life on the planet, when the land was barren and the seas were warm.

Naturalists have long marveled at its shell. The logarithmic spiral echoes the curved arms of hurricanes and distant galaxies. In Florence, the Medicis turned the pearly shells into ornate cups and pitchers adorned with gold and rubies.

Now, scientists say, humans are loving the chambered nautilus to death, throwing its very existence into danger.

“A horrendous slaughter is going on out here,” said Peter D. Ward, a biologist from the University of Washington, during a recent census of the marine creature in the Philippines. “They’re nearly wiped out.”

The culprit? Growing sales of jewelry and ornaments derived from the lustrous shell. To satisfy the worldwide demand, fishermen have been killing the nautilus by the millions, scientists fear. Now marine biologists have begun to assess the status of its populations and to consider whether it should be listed as an endangered species to curb the shell trade.

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Catching the nautilus is a largely unregulated free-for-all in which fishermen from poor South Pacific countries gladly accept $1 per shell.

Scientists worry that rising demand may end up eradicating an animal that grows slowly and needs 15 years or more to reach sexual maturity — an unusually long time for a cephalopod. (Its cousins include the squid and the octopus.)

“In certain areas, it’s threatened with extermination,” said Neil H. Landman, a biologist and paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History and the co-editor of “Nautilus: The Biology and Paleobiology of a Living Fossil,” a compendium of scientific reports.

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While the dwindling stocks of a beloved species can sometimes serve as a call to action — think of whales, pandas and polar bears — the threat to the chambered nautilus has gone largely unnoticed by the public. Specimens are for sale at relatively low prices and in seeming abundance. The situation is quite unlike that of rhinoceros horns or elephant tusks, which are considered contraband.

Deceptive marketing may help. The iridescent material inside nautilus shells is sometimes machined into pleasing shapes and sold as “Osmeña pearl.” (In the Philippines — home to much nautilus fishing — the Osmeña family is a political dynasty, and its name lends cachet.)

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But the alarms sounded with new intensity last year at a conference in Dijon, France. Patricia S. De Angelis of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service reported that the United States had imported 579,000 specimens from 2005 to 2008.

When Dr. Ward, of the University of Washington, heard that, “the figure shocked the hell out of me,” he recalled.

Suddenly, a species thought to be fairly plentiful became the object of serious concern.

This summer, the Fish and Wildlife Service paid for Dr. Ward and his colleagues to begin a global census off the Philippine island of Bohol, which has long figured prominently in the shell trade.

In an e-mail in August, he said the team was working with local fishermen to set 40 traps a day but was catching two creatures at most — a tenth to a hundredth the rate of a decade ago. “A horror show,” he called it, adding that he suspected that one particular kind of nautilus “is already extinct in the Philippines” or nearly so.

“A very old species is being killed off quickly out here,” he wrote.

The captive nautiluses were X-rayed and returned to the sea.

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tags: endangered species
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