In late January 2019 I took a trip to the Sonoran Desert coastline flanking the Sea of Cortez. The purpose of the trip was to photograph the Super Wolf Blood Moon lunar eclipse of January 20, 2019, as well as document any wildflowers happening after the fall rains of Hurricanes Rosa and Sergio, which passed over this region in October 2018. The jaunt was a success in both of those other regards, while also allowing for some other sidelines such as this coastal visit.

View of the Sea of Cortez in central Sonora, Mexico, looking north.

The Sonoran coast faces to the west and southwest, given the angle of the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) relative to the Mexican mainland. Sandy plains are punctuated by rugged ranges of desert mountains that are generally low in elevation, but appear prominent given the flatness of the landscape in between them.

Sea of Cortez view to the south.

In places, sand dunes up to 100 feet tall rise directly above the waterline. These dunes are partially migratory and partially stabilized by vegetation, including some gigantic cardon cacti (Pachycereus pringlei) which actually do quite well in them, contrary to saguaros and many other large cacti which are too unstable to support themselves in shifting sands for many decades of life.

The first conch shell I found on a brief stroll down the beach.

After parking my truck where the rough sandy road terminated at the upper edge of the beach, I wandered down to the water’s edge. The tide was low, but starting to come in. Tides in this part of the Sea of Cortez are fairly significant and can vary from 6 to 8 feet, which is not nearly as much as the 20 or more feet farther north, but above average for the ocean in general.

It’s alive!

Within a minute or so of me walking along the waterline, I discovered a pretty shell just at the edge of the waves. It was a conch (pronounced “konk”), and after turning it over I saw that its architect and creator was still in residence. I poked it gently and it retreated into its shell for some distance; but after only a few seconds it emerged again as I held it still to capture its portrait.

Craning its proverbial neck for a better view?

The mollusc was stretching out of its shell, evidently to try to reach the sand so that it could turn itself over from the unnatural upside-down position in which I was holding it. This view shows the hard, but not sharp or dangerous “claw” that these conchs have, which is utilized for locomotion along the sea floor and to help the animal erect itself should it be turned over by wave action or predators. The claw also serves as something called an operculum, which is a chitinous structure attached to the snail’s foot that closes the shell opening when it withdraws under threat. In a sense, the operculum claw is something akin to the creature closing the front door and hanging a ‘”Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

Conchs have fairly well-developed vision and their two eyes appear to give them a slightly curious, surprised look. Despite years of my youth spent being obsessed with shell collecting (which I still have in boxes somewhere) I had never actually seen a living conch before now. Of course, my childhood, teens, and young adulthood were spent in Colorado, not known for its oceanfront property, and my middle years have been spent in Arizona pursuing my even greater love of cacti and succulents, so in a sense it isn’t all that surprising that I’ve never seen eye to eye with a live conch before now….

The mouth is positioned between the eyes, giving this mollusc a distinctive facial expression. Well, at least relative to the more familiar clams and mussels, it has a facial expression….

I have tried to identify the type of conch I found, but after at least a half hour of trial and error searching online under various terms I am unable to definitively pin down what western Mexican species I have here. I am fairly sure that it is in the genus Strombus, commonly called true conchs, which has about 50 species in mostly tropical and subtropical waters globally. However genetic studies have led to a revision of the Strombus genus and split a number of species into smaller genera with different names, names which I never learned as a child or teen, which don’t sound familiar to me, and which no doubt hampered my google searching for a positive identification.

(Edit from December 13, 2022: A commenter identified this mollusk as the granulated conch, Persististrombus granulatus, which is native to much of the Pacific Ocean in the subtropics and tropics. The species appears to be widespread and common. I appreciate the identification assistance!)

The most famous conch is the large, gorgeously pink, and economically valuable Queen conch (Strombus gigas, now classified as Lobatus gigas), which inhabits the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico across the mainland from my western shoreline locale. The large pink and orange shells are a familiar sight to everyone in the Caribbean region, as are foods like conch chowder, conch fritters, and deep fried conch. This smaller Pacific conch relative was almost as charismatic in its own way.

Conchs are vegetarians that feed upon algae and seagrass, and are part of the food chain by becoming sources of sustenance for other molluscs that prey upon them, seabirds, sharks, fish, and of course humans. Humanity has of course overfished many Queen conch populations and while strict protections are effective in some Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico nations, others have few or no rules to prevent overexploitation. This is leading to colonies of these relatively long-lived and slow-maturing shellfish crashing in many places. I don’t think that this particular smaller Mexican species is utilized in any meaningful way by humans, but I mention the plight of its Atlantic Basin relatives to highlight the important economic and ecological roles of these critters.

Another conch, this one with seaweed attached to its shell like a small epiphytic rainforest plant would to a tree.

After admiring the beautiful gastropod’s shell and amusing “face”, I tossed it back into the water and resumed walking. Within 30 seconds I came across another, which I also admired, photographed more quickly, and returned to the sea. What followed over the next 5 minutes was a whole series of stranded conchs, a half dozen of them, found upon the sands several feet above the reach of the waves, photographed in my outstretched hand and thrown back into the water. I thought that finding the original one was cool. But why so many more, and why on such a short stretch of beach? Could the lunar eclipse and king tide of the prior night have had something do to with this?

Another conch, this one with an attractive set of knobby reddish protrusions upon its upper shell whorls.

The unanticipated conch rescue program I suddenly found myself in charge of gained even more momentum when I glanced up the beach towards the high tide line about 25 or 30 linear feet (and about 3 to 4 vertical feet) away from me. There, way far from the nearest water, lay yet more conchs!

I was pretty sure that all of the conchs stranded that far away from the water however many hours ago by a retreating tide were going to be dead. But I was mostly wrong. True, there were indeed a couple of unresponsive, comatose conchs that appear to have expired, but most of them were still alive and moved when I prodded them with my finger. So now I felt a moral obligation to scan the beach for more of them and return them to the water. It would still be easily another one or two hours before the incoming tide might wet them again; and while the January Sonoran sun was at its weakest and the temperatures were cool and mild, as opposed to torrid they way they would be in summertime, it is still a desert and dehydration could claim the lives of all of the hapless castaways.

A conch with subtle hints of tracks, where the animal was crawling around on the sand attempting to locate the water again.

Obviously these small conchs were at least somewhat resistant to being out of the water for a longer period of time than I would have expected. While that was indeed maybe true, in the end these are still marine animals adapted to living underwater and not in the atmosphere, and their tolerance of desiccation can only go so far before it becomes lethal.

That said, some of them had clearly exercised a fighting spirit and left behind tracks in the sand as they lurched along a fraction of an inch at a time, using their operculum claw to scrabble around on the sand looking for the ocean that had abandoned them. Some of these tracks were several feet long, meandering around in random directions. Oh, if only the conchs had enough awareness to simply move in a straight line downslope to the water – had they done that, a good proportion of them would have made it back to safety sooner. Too bad those cute little eyes weren’t able to see far enough to perceive the ocean. Or maybe equally problematic, they were unable to transit any  important visual survival messages to the rudimentary molluscan brain?

My conch collection.

Eventually, I gathered up 10 more conchs for a class portrait and immediately afterwards threw them back to the sea. I had found somewhere between 35 and 40 of them in total, all contained on a stretch of beach not much more than 200 yards long. Meanwhile, I could see many miles of similar playa stretching in both directions away from where I was, with innumerable other conchs shipwrecked up on the sand, all of them exposed to drying desert air and predatory seagulls. It was too much to ask for me to go find and retrieve even a fraction of them, so somewhat guiltily I got back into my vehicle and drove off to go photograph cacti. Evolution is a harsh teacher. If the conchs were feeding in shallow waters at the time of a high tide and got left behind by diminishing waters, well that’s just the way of the natural world. The fittest and most drought-tolerant shall survive, while the others shall perish.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jan Emming (@personofcactus)

Brief video of me saving another 5 conchs and musing on why there are so many at all.

A pink murex inhabits the same waters of the Sea of Cortez as the conchs.

There were also some other interesting things to be found on the beach in the short time I was there. Above, I am holding a pink murex shell (Hexaplex erythrostomus), which is quite common in the waters off of Baja California and southwards to Peru. While this one is badly eroded by tumbling about in the waves for awhile, the bright pink of the shell aperture and interior column is quite evident. Better-quality specimens of these seashells are commonly found after storms churn up the ocean, bringing in newly-dead individuals that haven’t been degraded by wave action to this extent.

Decapitated shark head on the beach.

I also found the head of some sort of a small bottom-feeding shark. I don’t know what this is precisely, but a quick online search indicates that it might be a type of dogfish shark.

Brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) soar single-file above the Sonoran coastline. Cactus, mountains, and sea – what a magnificent combination.

The Sonoran coast has much to recommend it (as does the coast of Baja California about 100 miles to the west) and there are lots of other things to post about in separate editions on my blog. My little unexpected conch rescue program was but one of the charms of this desert shoreline. More shall follow.