An adventure in the Philippines: The quest for living slit shells

摘要

The sun is bright in the cerulean sky as the water laps gently against my tangle-net fisherman's boat. Slowly but surely we strain against gravity, the water and the weight of the tangle-net as we slowly haul the tangle-net from the depths - 250 meters or 820 feet. I am excited and eagerly watch the contents of the net, mostly shells, as they spill into the bottom of the boat. I spot one, two, three, no, four of the holy grails - the slit shells of Balut Island. Well, that's the way I envisioned it; the reality was something a little bit different. I arrived on Balut Island via a very expensively chartered helicopter accompanied by a police/paramilitary escort. One living Mikadotrochus gotoi was alive in a Styrofoam cooler under a wheezing air conditioner. The other slit shells were no longer viable.