New Research Uncovers Shocking Level of Trade in Protected Chambered Nautiluses

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The beautiful marine mollusks have international protections, but sale of their shells continues by the tens of thousands.

 

Wildlife biologist Vincent Nijman has studied the gorgeous marine mollusk called the chambered nautilus for years, but he’s never had the opportunity to observe one swimming in the ocean.

“I’ve never seen one,” he admits. “They’re very difficult to see. I know very few people that actually seen them alive. They swim quite deep. They come up a little bit higher during the night, but even most divers haven’t seen them.”

He’s seen plenty of empty nautilus shells, though. Thousands of them.

Chambered nautiluses (Nautilus pompilius) — one of at least nine related species — live in the south Pacific around Indonesia and other countries. Previous research has identified unsustainable levels of trade in their shells, often sliced in half to reveal their intricate patterns (which resemble, but don’t quite match, mathematics’ fabled golden ratio). So many nautilus shells have been sold over the years that in 2016 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species required permits showing they were sustainably harvested. A few years later the United States added them to the Endangered Species Act. They’re also legally protected in Indonesia.

That hasn’t stopped the trade, though. New research by Nijman and his colleagues uncovered a rather shocking level of commerce related to chambered nautilus shells on the islands of Bali and Lombok.

On Bali the trade in whole or mounted shells continues in curio shops, art centers, airports, and other retail sites catering to tourists.

On Lombok the trade has taken an unexpected form. The shells are sliced up by the thousands to inlay into the surfaces of decorative furniture and handicrafts. A set of furniture, such as a table and four chairs, could require 60-80 shells. The craft receives heavy promotion from several government agencies, which call it “cukli” (a more generic word for “shell”).

According to their research, this trade uses at least 10,000 chambered nautilus shells a year, despite the species’ many levels of national and international protection.

The Revelator spoke with Nijman about this shocking level of trade and what needs to be done next to protect these elusive, charismatic animals — including how people can help.

You’ve been studying the nautilus trade for years. Why is it something you keep returning to?

Well, it’s one of many species I study. Where I do my studies, they offer them for sale. I first started looking properly into them when I was at a beach resort in the south of West Java where I initially went to look into the marine turtle trade. So they sell a lot of stuff, including marine turtles. I went quite a few times, and one of the other things they sell was nautilus shells and other large shells — horned helmets, Triton’s trumpet, all those amazing names. So I started collecting data on that as well. And then the last few years I’ve been doing all the work in Bali, and Bali and Lombok turn out to be the center for nautilus shell trade in Indonesia.

Right. And you mentioned Nautilus trade as part of your last contribution for us. So this is obviously a case where the science builds, you uncover one thing, and you’ll look for the next thing.

Yeah.

But were you surprised by what you found in this recent study? I sure was.

Yes, I was. I’ve been surprised a few times before, and I will be surprised, surely, in times coming.

With wildlife trade, often when people don’t pay attention to it, and nobody counts and nobody keeps track and nobody monitors, then it’s often very easy to think, “It’s a small-scale trade that doesn’t affect many individuals.” And if you start properly counting it — and crucially, talking to the people in the trade.

That’s what I do a lot. I simply, surprisingly, talk to them and ask “what do you sell? What do you have?” And my experience is that they’re very open and give me the information that I need.

And then you start triangulating: looking at official trade data, looking at what you observe yourself, looking at what traders tell you. If it all comes together and it comes to essentially something in the same order of magnitude, then I like to report on it.

So yes, it was surprising, but it’s true. The number of nautilus shells that we think are needed to sustain the trade in nautilus shell inlay furniture and handcrafts is indeed in the tens of thousands per year.

I think 20, 25 years ago in the U.S., it wasn’t uncommon to go into a store in the mall and see a nautilus shell cut in half to see that interesting pattern. You’re obviously still seeing that there in the home range, but this more decorative use, the inlay, it’s portrayed as a cultural thing, but it’s only like 50 years old.

Yeah, less even. Some people say it started in the late eighties, obviously in the nineties, but it’s fairly recent.

There are traditional wedding boxes in Lombok made from very light balsa wood and palm leaves. And they were often decorated with cowrie shells. These tiny little shells were basically stitched onto them. So it’s inspired by something that existed for a long time.
But what it is very novel is the massive furniture — these very bulky tables, seats, wardrobes and all those things. That’s much more recent, as in probably 20-30 years old. And for that, you require a lot of shells.

I sent you a photograph of a very large table. I put it up on my big screen I started counting, and I think I ended up at 10,000 pieces. It was especially elaborate one, but it takes eight months for them to make.

I admire the craftsmanship. The people that do it don’t make a lot of money.

It’s amazing to watch. It’s amazing to talk to these people. It’s amazing to see what they do. And it reminds me in a way, very much, of work I’ve done on ivory trade.

Some of the accounts I’ve read of the ivory carvers, they say their art doesn’t translate very well to other materials. Did anyone express that the nautilus shells have some special quality that makes them attractive to the artisans? Or would any shell do the trick?

I asked exactly that question because I knew it from the ivory trade. The answer is no, there is no alternative. And it has to do with the fact that nautilus shells are exactly the right thickness and the right strength. Some other shells are too thick, and others too thin and brittle. Nautilus shell is just about perfect. They couldn’t find an alternative.

Of course if we can find an alternative, then that will be the easiest solution.

Now, in your email, you equated this with the trade in orangutans and tigers, or at least the endangered status of those species. Can you speak about that a little bit more?

One point to compare them is basically looking at the legislation. Indonesia has very good legislation in terms of protecting some of its wildlife. It’s a fairly long list of legally protected species. Tigers are on there, orangutans are on there. A whole range of species are on there. And chambered nautiluses are on there as well. In that sense, legally, there’s no difference between a nautilus shell and a tiger.
Now, of course, society judges them differently and therefore I assume prosecutors will look at them differently and therefore judges will look at them differently. But the law is exactly the same. It’s a protected species.

You can’t trade it, you can’t buy it, you can’t sell it.

Now what happens in reality is that this trade happens very openly in shops on the high streets in Bali. You can see them in the windows. You can see them for sale, easily recognizable, because they’re still whole.

This furniture is everywhere. In every government building I’ve been, there is this furniture. They all have it, but clearly nobody sees it as a problem.

The shell trade, generally speaking — are people even aware that they’re buying the remains of formerly living animals?

No. Of course, some of them know exactly what they’re doing. But I think by and large, what people don’t realize is that when they buy a shell, even if you’re on a beach somewhere, that these shells are not necessarily from that one beach.

There’s a large network of trade in shells, and the shells you buy perhaps in a beach resort in China may actually come from India. The ones you buy from in Java were maybe fished in Eastern Indonesia.

What is different with nautilus shells compared to some other shells, especially the smaller ones, is that nautilus shells are not picked up on the beach. They’re not collected by people. The only way to get reasonable numbers of nautilus shells is to fish for them. And you do that with crates or with cages.

You bait them with chicken meat or with other meat, and then you drop them to under 50 meters at night.

The nautiluses swim in, you haul them up, and you have 3, 4, 5, 6 of those shells. And you repeat that a couple of times during the night.
That’s how you collect the numbers of nautilus shells. You can walk on the beaches for days and not come across a single nautilus shell.

When nautilus shells are on the beach, they are often dead because they’ve been preyed upon by octopus. Octopus produce a very distinct bore hole on the side of the shell, and that’s how they suck out the meat. I don’t see that in trade, so the ones that I see are not washed up.

There’s been a lot of work last in the last couple of years getting the chambered nautilus onto the Endangered Species Act here in the United States and on CITES. It seems like the scientific evidence suggests that this is in no way sustainable. Would you agree with that?

It’s difficult, because we don’t have any field data. We don’t know exactly where they’re being fished. It’s probably a large part of Eastern Indonesia.

What we do know is that people in Bali say “We used to catch them in the north of Bali. We don’t do that anymore. They’re no longer there.”

In Lombok they say “We used to catch them from Lombok and Bali, but they’re no longer there. So now we get them from more from Eastern Indonesia or even further.” So that suggests that indeed overfishing is a problem.

In reality we don’t know exactly where they are being caught. But there are a few studies from other places where these nautilus shells have been monitored for long periods of time, and fishing very quickly leads to a depletion of their numbers. So it’s highly unlikely that it’s sustainable.

Also, we can turn it around: If you want a trade in them, it’s not the question whether the people who think you shouldn’t trade should say if it’s sustainable. It’s the other way around. If you’re trading them, you have to show that it’s a sustainable trade.

Who do you most want to be aware of this study? Would it pay to get the tourists to know, the store owners, the police, the judges? Who would make the most difference by knowing more about this and trying to make some behavioral changes?

I think when it comes to sheer numbers, it would be good if we could probably shut down this entire inlay trade. And that requires the local authorities in Lombok to take action.

That’s going to be complicated because it’s seen as traditional Lombok, but as it stands now, it is illegal.

And I think it is very, very strange to have these workshops in the open. You have art markets in the open, you have everybody in their offices using it. I think that is something that needs to be fixed. And perhaps there’s a way where you can find some little ground, but something needs to be done.

I think what is happening now is simply not okay.

And yet we have this large-scale trade where all kinds of governments or government-linked institutions are involved, including chambers of commerce, regional airports, the prison service, regional development groups, micro loans — all those things come together in Lombok.

And that to me needs to be fixed.

What may actually accelerate that is if people from outside take an interest, and that can perhaps best be done in Bali, which is largely economically dependent on tourism.

And now we’re talking about the whole shells, which are targeted at international and domestic tourists.

If we can get some leverage there, where international tourists basically speak out and say, “we don’t want this to be offered to us, we don’t want this to be openly offered sale, and we want people to take proper action against it,” that may help.

And on that same note, if countries that import nautilus shells from Indonesia take notice and stop that, seize the shipments that come in, if that’s possible within their own legal framework, then that would help as well.

I think what we need is multilayered and ideally at the same time action.

For the consumers, is there a communication channel that exists for them to say, “we don’t want this,” or would the best way for them to be there in person and say, “no, I can’t buy this.”

I think it’s always good when you see wildlife for sale — or when you see anything that you don’t like — is inform the person that sells it why you won’t buy it, but why you will buy something else.

It’s not that you don’t want to trade with them, but you don’t want that. You can even say, if you continue trading with this, I’ll go to your neighbor or your competitor and buy my stuff there.

I think it’s always good to explain why not to do something in a polite way. That helps.

What we see in Bali is there’s lots of curio shops, wildlife shops, art shops, that sell nautilus shells, but it’s one of more than 100 products they sell. If you take that one product out, no one is going to go bankrupt. So tell them why you want to buy this, but not that. I think that helps.

It also may help if you perhaps could inform perhaps tourism organizations. Slightly higher up, chambers of commerce would help. If you’re a foreigner, inform your embassy.

It’s always difficult to judge what helps. But I think it’s also true that unless you inform people that you are aware of it and that you don’t like it, it’s difficult to expect them to make change.

It’s not to inform them because they don’t know. It’s to inform them that you know that they know. It’s not that the authorities are not aware of this — because it’s in the open, it’s completely out there.

It’s not hidden, but there’s no reason to take action because there’s no societal pressure to do it. And I think that needs to change.

John R. Platt
February 20, 2026