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have yet to overcome. Furthermore, a changing environ- ment with increased frequency of extreme storms causing negative effects on infrastructure is another barrier to broadscale aquaculture that has impacted past commercial operations (Wida, 2018). However, queen conch aquacul- ture remains a critical tool in education and tourism and has contributed to understanding queen conch biology and ecology. Queen conch aquaculture should be encour- aged as a means of furthering scientific knowledge and increasing community support while simultaneously and transparently communicating its current limitations for repopulation efforts.


Conservation benefits of aquaculture


Queen conch aquaculture is widely perceived as a positive and successful scientific practice (Table 1). People who enjoy consuming or celebrating the conch throughout the Caribbean benefit from understanding the lifecycle and the staggering mortality experienced as they grow towards maturity. Small-scale aquaculture facilities and mobile labs make larval transport and slow growth tangible con- cepts for educators, students and the general public. For example, the Turks and Caicos Queen Conch Farm, a com- mercial enterprise, was an effective educational attraction for tourists (Supplementary Table 2). Small-scale farms and hatcheries also provide an opportunity for community involvement and could partially incentivize a decrease in fishing pressure by paying fishers to participate in conserva- tion programmes rather than in harvesting. Aquaculture has also answered important questions about larval hatch- ing, development, metamorphosis, swimming capacities and food consumption (Stoner et al., 2023). The spatial management and conservation of the queen conch has also been shaped by contributions from aquaculture that facilitate connectivity and demographic modelling across their range (Vaz et al., 2022; Stoner et al., 2023). Future research on the impact of stressors such as climate change and disease could use cultured individuals so as not to impact wild stock. There are many longstanding research needs before aquaculture can contribute effectively to in situ restoration and conservation. Overall, evaluating the plausibility of restoration aquaculture for the queen conch requires a large-scale experiment across multiple locations that tracks free-ranging individuals from release through to maturity, to gauge mortality, realized population enhancement and the potential benefits across the ecosystem. It is imperative that an interdisciplinary team of aquaculture practitioners, ecologists and local stakeholders, including fishers, design and conduct these experiments to fully evaluate and sub- stantiate success prior to proposing aquaculture as a realistic and scalable avenue for population recovery.


Fisheries management


Policy changes have been successfully used to rebuild queen conch populations across many spatial and temporal scales. Over small spatial scales, no-take protected areas can har- bour breeding populations (Stoner et al., 2012; Kough et al., 2017; Tewfik et al., 2019) that replenish unprotected areas, as predicted by biophysical models (Kough et al., 2019) and confirmed empirically (Kough, 2024). At the country scale, in Jamaica, scientific surveys and genomic connectivity studies (Blythe-Mallett et al., 2021) coupled with adaptive fishery management over the course of several decades (Ehrhardt et al., 2023) led to a sustainable seafood certification by the Marine Stewardship Council in 2024. For severely overexploited populations, the management strategy of last resort is a full fishery closure coupled with protection. In Florida, USA, these measures resulted in a protracted recovery from ,30,000 adult queen conch in 1986,to 200,000 in 1990 (Berg & Glazer, 1995), and an esti- mated 700,000 in 2017 (Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, unpubl. data). Community action, such as starting a queen conch nur-


sery or citizen scientist surveys, may instil conservation ethos. Should active intervention beyond policy be deemed necessary, translocations to increase adult densities above minimum thresholds for reproduction have been posited as an alternative to aquaculture (Delgado et al., 2004; Delgado & Glazer, 2007). Translocating queen conchs from larval sinks to larval sources to boost reproductive out- put can provide an inexpensive, genetically sound alterna- tive to aquaculture as hatchery production costs are eliminated. Translocations maintain the genetic integrity of the stock because of the use of wild animals as opposed to releasing hatchery-reared juveniles potentially derived from few parents (i.e. there is no outbreeding depression). Lastly, translocations will have a more immediate impact on reproductive output because there is no need to wait for juveniles to survive to reproductive maturity. Ex- perimental-scale translocations have shown that translo- cated queen conchs engage in reproductive activities at their new location (Delgado et al., 2004) and do not displace na- tive individuals within the aggregation (Delgado & Glazer, 2007). However, a cautious approach must be taken to en- sure that the carrying capacity of the habitat is not exceeded and that larval sinks and sources are correctly identified.


The way forward


Queen conch aquaculture has been practiced with success in laboratories and hatcheries around the Caribbean, yet there is so far no scientifically quantified or documented example of successful repopulation of wild stocks with cultured conchs. A well-documented example of an ecologically viable, self- replenishing population that supplements or replaces


Oryx, 2024, 58(6), 700–709 © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605324001443


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