Town Chronicle

Florida’s waters and beaches often yield natural treasures — and, if you’re lucky, real buried treasure




 

 

As our weather gets more conducive to going outdoors to explore our beautiful area, it’s the small things that remind us how lucky we are to live here. We all have access to the water — whether it’s a creek, the river or the Gulf of Mexico — where discoveries are ready to be found by you!

This is especially true this time of year: When our waters warm up, the marine life really gets active. A most unusual creature is the horseshoe crab.

Each spring during the high tides of the new and full moon, thousands of these critters can be seen spawning on our beaches, in the estuaries and tidal rivers of Southwest Florida. Although Florida has a large population of them, they also can be found from Maine to the Yucatan. Delaware Bay is home to the largest population of American horseshoe crabs (limulus polyphemos).

The horseshoe crab’s long, spiked tail is not a weapon; it’s used as a rudder to help the crab steer and to help it right itself if it gets turned over.

 

 

The shell is shaped like a horseshoe and is jointed in several places. The crab can see about 3 feet away, and (as with human males) its eyes are mostly used for finding mates. A dozen legs under its shell and hundreds of flattened gill plates help it propel through water and move on shore.

Horseshoe crabs feed on worms and mollusks, mostly at night, and you can often spot them during a moonlight beach walk. They outgrow and molt their shells about 16 times a year, each time increasing in size by 25%.

Parts of the horseshoe crab are used in the medical field to detect the purity of medicines and help speed blood clotting. According to a research study, chitin — a material found in the horseshoe crab’s exoskeleton — is considered to have healing properties and has been used as an absorbable suture material and for wound dressings for burn victims.

Another shore dweller is the hermit crab. These crabs start their life cycle in the open water and adapt to living on land. They are called hermit crabs because they do not have a hard shell of their own — they will take up residence in a hollow shell that suits their size and move on to another as they grow. These crabs are a favorite tourist purchase from seaside shops, but it is best to see them in their natural habitat.

 

 

Another find for the casual beachcomber is the black, 3-inch-long mermaid’s purse, which is actually an egg sac from a stingray like skate. It is called a purse because the sac washes up on shore, filling with small shells as it washes in the surf.

Another unusual beach find are whelk egg casings. Whelks are shells that grow in a spiral. The snake-like egg casings are 3 feet long and spiraled. Each disc of the spiral is the egg of a baby whelk. The casings are attached to the bottom of bays, beach areas and estuaries. After the whelks are hatched, the empty casings wash up on our shorelines.

There are several types of sand dollars on our beaches: the common keyhole sand dollar, the purple sand dollar and the puffed-up sea biscuit. They are part of the sea urchin family, which have small spikes that move them along in search of food. When you find one on shore, it will be very brittle and sun bleached, and the spikes have already fallen off. Many beach shops have these for sale in their natural condition. Artisans like to paint beach scenes on them, and they are a favorite tourist novelty.

 

 

People come from all over the world to look for rare specimens of shells particular to our area. The strands of islands including Sanibel, south and north Captiva, Cayo Costa, Gasparilla and the barrier islands of our Gulf Coast are home to over 400 species of shells. Juan Ponce de Leon named Sanibel Island “Costa de Carocles” — Coast of Shells.

The most common shells are the large horse conch (pronounced konk) and another large shell, the queen conch. These are the types you see in the movies in which Polynesians blow into it like a horn, to announce royalty or call in the fishing boats of for some other ceremony.

 

 

Shells such as junonia, nutmeg, Scotch bonnet and lion’s paw are more rare, but can still be found. Remember, it is illegal to take shells with living creatures in them — or, in the case of sand dollars, still active. There are some great books on shelling in Florida that are well illustrated so you can identify what you’ve found.

Another treasure on this coast is certified treasure — as in, pirate treasure, for example. There are many historians who dispute the legends of pirates and buried treasure, but there is always some truth you can uncover back of the tales and legends. That was certainly the case for one man, Mel Fisher by name.

Mr. Fisher was a modern-day explorer who searched for treasure in the waters of the lower Florida Keys for decades, always coming up empty of finding anything or real significance. In fact, some folks called him a nut and a crazy man — that is, until 1985, when he found the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a Spanish treasure galleon lost in a hurricane in 1622. This one find rewarded him with over $450 million in gold, silver, jewels and rare artifacts. He had a dream, he ignored the naysayers and suffered personal losses — but he eventually laughed all the way to the bank.

Not all finds are as spectacular. In 2021, a treasure hunter using a metal detector in Indian River shores discovered a trove of 22 silver coins valued at about $6,000 — the remains of 12 Spanish galleons that also sank in a storm in 1715.

In the more than 40 years I have been in this area, I have found Spanish doubloons, gold, silver pieces of eight and Portuguese coins (from fisherman in 1800s Charlotte Harbor). I’ve also found pottery, old guns, Indian artifacts and more. All these were found while wading the shallow water at very low tide. I did not use a metal detector or other device to locate deposits.

Back in the early 1980s, a friend of mine wanted to go fishing, but a winter front made the harbor very rough and shallow. So, he took his small boat upriver. While fishing, he snagged something as he was trolling. Not wanting to lose his good lure, he backed up and picked up this thing he was snagged on. It was about a foot long, 2 to 3 inches across and weighing about 8 pounds. He decided to hold onto it for later inspection.

It spent a lot of time in the boat and then in the back of his old pickup. He forgot he had it until a month or two later, when he and his friends were discussing fishing by the back of his truck. Somebody picked this object up, all black and encrusted with barnacles as it was, pulled out a pocketknife and started scraping the corrosion away. They discovered what he had found was a solid silver bar. Here’s the best part: He remembered where he found it, went back and found 174 more bars of silver. True story.

As you walk the beaches and explore the bays and rivers of our great outdoors, be observant. Good fortune can happen to you!

— Capt. Dennis Kirk and his wife, Nancy, are avid mariners and outdoor enthusiasts currently living in North Port. Since the 1970s, their love of nature in Southwest Florida has allowed them to experience the dream of writing about their travels and adventures of sailing, fishing and flying.

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