Photo: FIFCO
Collecting seashells might not be as harmless an activity as you think. As it turns out, the adage of leaving nothing but footprints and taking away only memories is proving to be far more important to keep in mind.
Research from the University of Florida and Barcelona found that the act of taking away seashells can degrade coastal ecosystems and endanger biodiversity, as the removal has the potential to alter sediment stability and weaken the coastline's ability to withstand the effects of climate change.
This is a problem in Costa Rica because, over the decades, a significant number of seashells have been seized at airports in Costa Rica, to prevent them from being taken abroad. However, these shells ended up buried since it was impossible to know where exactly they came from – Costa Rica is sandwiched by the Caribbean Sea in the east and the Pacific Ocean in the west. Without the ability to properly classify these shells, returning them to the sea brings risks, including introducing non-native organisms, parasites, or microbes that might disrupt local biodiversity.
The "Back Home" project, led by FIFCO (Florida Ice and Farm Company) in collaboration with Imperial, the Ministry of Environment and Energy, AERIS, and the University of Costa Rica, has developed an AI tool that classifies seashells using photographs.
The tool was trained using over 18,500 photos of 525 different species of shells and has a sorting accuracy rate of up to 90%. This enables the project to accurately differentiate shells from the Caribbean and the Pacific and return them appropriately.
The end result? Over 36,000 seashells were returned to their natural habitats in 2024 alone. In the spirit of openness, the company has made the model’s open-source code available to the scientific community, so other countries can use it to help train their own classification systems.
Source: FIFCO
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