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Environmental History |
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| In addition to my studies on the
environmental history of marine mammals in the Caribbean, I have also
studied the fate of other species such as the pearl-oyster mussel in that
region. Example: Romero, A. 2003. Death and taxes: The case of the depletion of pearl oyster beds in sixteenth-century Venezuela. Conservation Biology 17(4):1-12. Abstract Historical ecology is a growing field whose results and interpretations not only help to understand past patterns of resource exploitation but also provide useful tools in conservation biology and resource management. Many of these studies rely on paleontological and archeological information but with little precise data on both the intensity of the exploitation and the biology of the species involved. Further, many of these studies are devoid of the social and political contexts, which can help to better interpret the pattern of exploitation. I report here the depletion of the pearl-oyster (Pinctada imbricata) beds off the coast of Cubagua, Venezuela, in the 16th. century and its replacement by the turkey-wing mussel (Arca zebra). To that end, I synthesized the historical events as well as the economic and political background that led to that depletion. Then, based on historical tax documents, I made a conservative estimation of the level of exploitation. I used the natural history of both species of mollusks to reconstruct not only the pattern of exploitation of the pearl oyster but also the ecological factors that may have influenced its replacement by the turkey-wing mussel. Also, I point out the population ecology consequences of this overexploitation and what it meant to the indigenous populations for that area of the world. I found that tax records are extremely useful in describing the causes and consequences of overexploitation and that these records can be very useful in studying post-Columbian ecological impacts in the Americas.
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