Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells Read online

  A few years ago, while exploring the warm clear waters of the Red Sea, a team of divers found a species of giant clam that no one had seen before. When he first caught sight of the deeply crimped shell, Claudio Richter from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany suspected this was something different to the seven known giant clam species. Further physical analysis and DNA tests confirmed the species was new to science and the team named it Tridacna costata (from the Latin word costatus, meaning ribbed). Scouring the reefs across the Gulf of Aqaba and the northern Red Sea, the divers found only a smattering of living Tridacna costata. To work out whether this has always been the case, the team also hunted for giant clams on land, in the sandy deserts fringing the Red Sea, in fossil reefs that flourished when sea levels were much higher. They saw that Tridacna costata was much more common 125,000 years ago, making up more than 80 per cent of the giant clams in the region. Today, they make up less than one per cent of the living clam community. Over the millennia these giant clams have also become distinctly less giant. They have shrunk in size to their present-day dimensions of 30 centimetres, or roughly a foot across. In the past, the clams would have weighed at least 20 times more than they do today.

  The most likely explanation for the drastic decline in the clams’ stature and abundance is overfishing by humans. When people hunt, they almost always take the biggest animals first and a decline in average body size in a wild population is a good indication that humans have come along and helped themselves. In the case of the giant clams, those early people also left behind their fishing tools. In fossil reefs further along the Red Sea coast, in Eritrea, archaeologists have found palaeolithic stone tools that could have been oyster shuckers, left behind by people who waded out to gather clams and oysters. These gastronomical findings are reshaping our understanding of human migrations, providing new evidence that a coastal route out of Africa may have been important. And the loss of giant clams from the Red Sea, all those thousands of years ago, was just a taste of things to come.

  The story of people overconsuming molluscs repeats itself again and again. Huge piles of empty shells show how abundant queen conch used to be across the Caribbean; now they are rare, and continue in their decline despite international efforts to protect them. In kelp forests of the Californian coast, divers have plunged further and further beneath the waves to find valuable abalone. The white and black species are now endangered, while the red and green are heading the same way. We are working our way into the depths and through the colours.

  Perhaps the most famous mollusc stocks to collapse were the New York oysters that used to be pulled by the million from the Hudson River. Mark Kurlansky tells their story in The Big Oyster, of times when shellfish were eaten in Manhattan only a few blocks from where they grew. As stocks close to New York diminished, fisheries swept along the coast, leaving behind a trail of destruction. The same thing happened on America’s western seaboard and in Australia, where similar short-lived fisheries fed demand for oysters in San Francisco and Sydney.

  Following all these declines, most of the molluscs we eat today are farmed, but there are a few places in the world where wild oysters still thrive. And it is there that people are trying very hard not to let history repeat itself.

  Guardians of the oyster forest

  A short way south along the coast from the baobab tree and its shell-island home, I came across more heaps of empty shells. I had crossed the wide mouth of the River Gambia on board a crowded and rusty ferry that crawled slower than walking pace towards Banjul. The Gambia’s capital sits on an island where the river meets the Atlantic Ocean. The rest of the country lies to the east, impossibly long and narrow, like a finger poking into Senegal. I continued my journey by taxi, crossing the bridge that links Banjul to the mainland, and by the side of the road I spied a series of silvery grey mounds and a queue of cars pulled over on the hard shoulder. This is where Gambians go to buy oysters.

  In The Gambia, as elsewhere in the world, oysters are a delicacy. Gambian oysters also happen to be some of the cheapest you can buy. A bag of smoked oysters, scooped up in an empty tin can, will set you back 25 Gambian dalasis – less than 40 pence – and they come from an extraordinary place. Right on Banjul’s doorstep is a swathe of rich, green mangroves. The Tanbi Wetland National Park covers an area slightly smaller than the island of Manhattan. Living in small settlements scattered along the fringes of this aquatic forest are women who venture out and gather oysters from among the mangrove roots. Many of them are the sole breadwinners in their families; the men are either lazy or long gone. I was planning to meet the all-female oyster harvesters and the woman who has been helping them to help themselves while at the same time protecting The Gambia’s fragile wetlands.

  Fatou Janha, known respectfully as Auntie Fatou, was born and raised in The Gambia but spent many years moving around the world with her diplomat husband; returning home later in life, she decided one day to stop and talk to the oyster sellers.

  Since she was a little girl, Fatou had seen women selling oysters by the roadside on the way into Banjul. ‘It suddenly occurred to me that these people need help,’ Fatou told me, as we sat in her office near the Old Jeshwang market with the voices of songbirds drifting in through the open windows. ‘But at first they didn’t understand why I should be interested in them. People have ignored them for a long time. As I always say, people buy oysters but they don’t look behind the oysters.’

  On the day she stopped to talk to them, the oyster harvesters told Fatou about their lives and the troubles they faced making ends meet. She left her number and told them to call if there was any way she could help. She waited, and a few weeks later her phone rang.

  When Fatou originally came back to The Gambia she set up a boutique, making and selling clothes. But for many years now, she has been pouring her energies into the TRY Oyster Women’s Association, the community project that grew from that first meeting and from Fatou’s vision that the women of Tanbi should be allowed to try to improve their lives.

  Back in 2007 when TRY was founded, there was no denying that Tanbi’s natural resources were being pushed too far. Since the 1960s the local population has been growing, with people migrating in from neighbouring Senegal and Guinea-Bissau. Many of them are Jola, an ethnic group that has inhabited these coasts for centuries, in particular the troubled Casamance region of southern Senegal. For a long time they have been living and working in Tanbi. They have always supported themselves and their families by harvesting shellfish from these rich waters but, over the last decade or so, declining catches have forced them to roam deeper into the mangrove forests. The few shellfish they found were all rather scrawny and small. By the time Fatou came along, the oyster gatherers were finding it very difficult to make a living from the forest.

  The simple but powerful thing Fatou did was to bring the oyster harvesters together and give them a unified voice. In the beginning, TRY had 40 members from one village. Fatou helped them to get a bank account, raised some funds and set up a micro-finance scheme so the women could start other small businesses and make money during the closed rainy season. She organised classes to teach the women and their daughters to bake and make handicrafts, provided healthcare advice, and encouraged them to start saving for the first time; in particular, she wanted the women to be able to afford school fees and allow their daughters to finish their education. Word soon spread, and now TRY has more than 500 members from 15 villages across Tanbi. Women who a few years previously were strangers have now became close friends and co-workers.

  Fatou suggested we pay a visit to the mangroves to see some of the women at work, so we rented a small boat and slowly motored along the tributaries, known as bolongs, that percolate through the Tanbi wetlands and divide the forest into a mosaic of islands. Salt-encrusted leaves of mangrove trees rose up around us with their stilt roots looping and dipping into the water. A Malachite Kingfisher flashed past, a dart of electric blue, and a gaggle of pelicans rested in high branches, p
reening their feathers with enormous beaks. Around 360 bird species are known to inhabit the wetlands, including many global migrants, and birdwatchers fly in from across the world to see them. There are other forest denizens that I didn’t see, but it was good to know that Red Colobus monkeys were perched somewhere in the dense thickets, there were short-clawed otters padding through the undergrowth in search of crabs, and perhaps even a manatee was hiding submerged somewhere nearby in the murky waters.

  As we chugged through the mangroves, Fatou told me more about oyster harvesting and selling. The women spend hours shucking the oysters, sometimes with the help of younger men in the villages, then they roast and smoke them. Long-term water monitoring is underway to see if it might be possible to eat them safely uncooked. Fatou eventually hopes to see the oysters on sale in local hotels and restaurants. There are two main types of holidaymakers who flock to The Gambia – wildlife seekers and cheap sun, sea and sand seekers – and hopefully they could both be persuaded to try the local seafood.

  Gathering oysters is tough, physical work, but the women much prefer it to being housemaids, the only alternative they see for earning money. The oysters give them independence and a sense of identity; the women now belong to a close-knit sisterhood. Fatou explains that they are some of the poorest people in the country, living in marginalised communities that other Gambians know very little about.

  ‘I want these women to be recognised by society and respected,’ she told me. She is incensed that so many Gambians enjoy eating oysters but pay so little attention to where they come from or who collects them. In the short time that I spent with her, I had already seen how Fatou’s straight talking and irresistible energy inspires the women and keeps TRY going. Of course, she insisted that it is the women themselves who are strong.

  We turned off the boat’s engine, and Fatou called out in a high-pitched whoop. Seconds later we heard a reply; this is how the women communicate and locate each other while they’re working in the dense forest. Down a side creek, two of them had pulled up their wooden dugout canoe and were busily gathering oysters.

  It was early May and the oyster season was in full swing. Until a few years ago, oyster harvesters would leave the mangroves in June, at the start of the rainy season, and return again each December; now they don’t come back until March, to give the oysters more of a chance to grow. Being tropical species, mangrove oysters grow much faster than their cool-water cousins, and a couple of months makes a big difference. Within a year of extending the closed season, harvesters were already finding larger oysters, which they could sell for higher prices. An added benefit is the fact that larger molluscs will leave behind more offspring for the next generation.

  One of TRY’s most pioneering achievements has been an agreement giving them exclusive rights to work in Tanbi. The women of TRY, along with their advisory committee, can now decide who is allowed to collect oysters and issue fines to people who break the rules. This is the first time a group of women in Africa has been granted ownership of an important natural resource, forming the basis of their livelihoods. The wetlands are no longer a free-for-all.

  Each village has been put in charge of its own community bolong, and there are communal areas where all TRY members can work. In addition to the extended closed season, parts of Tanbi are now set aside on rotation and left alone for much longer to give oyster stocks an even better chance of recovering and replenishing nearby areas. Anyone caught illegally cutting firewood or gathering too many oysters from the wrong place or at the wrong time of year faces a hefty penalty. The agreement also covers West African Bloody Cockles that the women gather from the riverbed. Taking undersized cockles is another finable offence.

  None of this would have been possible until the oyster gatherers joined forces under the banner of TRY. The agreement was based on a complex, multi-agency co-management plan that involved departments of forestry and fisheries plus many others. This sort of negotiation is arduous and needed the women to join forces. If they were still individual people working alone, who didn’t know and talk to each other, an agreement would never have been reached. And the women haven’t simply been handed over the rights to the wetlands to do with as they please: they are committed to looking after them. They are now the official custodians of Tanbi.

  The tide was falling and I climbed out of the boat, intending to make my way across the shore to where the women were working, but straight away I got stuck. The mud was up to my knees and sucking at my toes, so I stood where I was, windmilling my arms, trying my best not to make the situation worse. One of the women saw me in trouble and came to my rescue, effortlessly plucking me free and leading me over to higher, firmer ground. I thanked her, in my one bit of Wolof, and she smiled back and continued with her work. She pulled two pairs of socks over her hands to protect her from the sharp shells and using a small knife she nimbly chipped oysters from the exposed mangrove roots. Thick crusts of oysters make the roots look like they’ve been dipped in lumpy cement porridge.

  In the past, some harvesters used machetes to chop away whole roots covered in oysters, big and small; this was wiping out juvenile oysters and damaging the forest itself. Now, as well as being much more selective and careful about taking only individual oysters of the right size, the women of TRY are also trialling an aquaculture technique similar to the one used for mussels, hanging ropes to catch young oysters from the water.

  With a basket full, one of the women picked her way across to the water’s edge and tipped the oysters into the canoe. I followed and once again got firmly stuck in the mud. This was all getting rather embarrassing and I noticed for the first time that the woman who kept stopping work to help me out, with her incredibly strong, reassuring grip, was at least six months pregnant.

  A few days after our trip to the mangroves I got to see another side of Gambian oyster harvesting. Every year, Fatou organises an oyster festival. The idea is to raise money, raise the profile of Gambian oysters and at the same time give the members of TRY a chance to celebrate. Next to the roadside where the women shuck, smoke and sell oysters, set back in a grove of baobab trees, a sandy arena was laid out for the festivities. I arrived just as the women started to parade in. The members of each village were carrying a banner announcing who they were and wearing outfits to match. The costumes on display were all stunning. Some villagers had dresses made from vibrant wax prints trimmed with ruffles and lace; others wore tie-dyed skirts and crisp white shirts, with strings of multi-coloured beads strung around their necks and across their shoulders. Everybody had immaculate hairdos, braided in neat rows and decorated with bright clips, or they wore colourful headscarves matching their dresses, tied into elegant bows and knots. As they promenaded around the arena, the women began to dance and sing, and they wouldn’t stop again for another two days.

  The band was a troop of tireless young men, four drumming and one with a beaten-up saxophone that he blew as tunefully and incessantly as possible. There was a sound system with noisy speakers and a single microphone for people to sing into, which they were doing without a hint of bashfulness.

  Everybody danced, from teenagers to grandmothers, standing in a circle and taking turns to come forward and perform for the crowd, who sang and clapped and cheered. The rhythmical drummers were accompanied by a chorus of whistles, which the women wore on colourful chains around their necks, giving the event the feel of an early nineties rave. This was the first oyster festival I’d been to, and somehow I imagine there are few in the world quite like this one.

  The music and dancing paused briefly while speeches were made, mainly for the benefit of attending patrons and dignitaries who sat demurely watching proceedings from the shady marquees. Then the boisterous celebrations continued with a highly unusual performance: the members of TRY took part in a wrestling tournament.

  Wrestling is a hugely popular sport in West Africa, but it is normally the preserve of boys and men. Every morning and evening along beaches in Senegal and The Gambia, young
men congregate to practise their wrestling moves. Professional wrestlers are celebrities paid as much as international soccer stars, and contests can draw enormous crowds. It was Fatou’s idea to let the women have a go.

  ‘The Jola tribe are known for wrestling, so why can’t women wrestle?’ she said. Girls wrestle with their siblings at home for fun, she explained, so why not put on a competition for the women of TRY? It was the first time anyone had done something like this, so she could only guess what the response would be. And as it turned out, like most things Fatou sets her mind to, the wrestling at the oyster festival was a runaway success.

  Pairs of women and girls stepped up to the sandy ring, wearing wrestling loincloths over their colourful outfits. At the start of each round, the women performed taunting, stompy dances to psych their opponent. Then they locked arms and heads and tried to grapple each other to the ground, all the time marshalled by a referee. Occasionally one wrestler would successfully grab her rival between the legs and launch her into the air, and the crowd went wild. The victor was hoisted on someone’s shoulders and processed around the arena, sometimes the loser as well, and mostly I couldn’t tell which was which. None of that seemed to matter.