Excerpt from Caribbean Cuisine

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To visit the islands and not try the ubiquitous "Queen of the Sea" would be almost a sacrilege. If you had to choose a single food to embody the uniqueness of Caribbean island fare, this would be it.

Conch, (pr. KONK), the rosy pink, spiral-shelled, marine gastropod, is actually the generic term for all large, spiral, univalve marine shells. The scientific name for the Queen Conch, or lambi as it is called in the southern Caribbean, is Strombus Gigas. Fossils of this exact creature date back some 65 million years.

Credit: Marilyn Mower

Increasing demand and consumption of conch, along with foolish over-harvesting practices on some islands, reduced the conch population to an estimated 10 percent of its numbers in the early 1900s. In some areas it is an endangered species and capturing conch is banned until such time as the stocks return. This process is hampered by loss of its turtle grass habitat. However, due to scientific studies in the 1960s, conch farms in the Turks and Caicos, Bonaire and Venezuela are successfully breeding and reproducing conch for consumer demand. Other efforts are also being made to protect conch reproduction in the natural environment. Approximately one conch out of 500,000 will survive in its natural setting. These odds are dramatically increased in marine hatcheries.

A Queen Conch reaches adulthood in about four years and yet can live to be 20. Conch eggs are smaller than a grain of sand. From the day an egg hatches, it begins to grow its shell in a clockwise direction. In their larval stage, the baby conch swim by means of hairs surrounding their bodies. After three weeks, they sink to the sand, burrow in and begin a metamorphosis. After hiding in the sand for a year, the juvenile conch emerges to begin a life of grazing on algae. The conch moves by pulling itself along on its operculum, or black claw, which is connected to its posterior foot. As the conch animal grows, so does its shell by spiraling outward to a maximum of about one foot ...