Where the Desert Meets the Sea: Buceo para Callo

This past week has kept me very busy. With Xavier visiting (a researcher who was actually the first fellow at the Kino Bay Station), I was able to participate in projects that I normally wouldn't have been involved with. In addition to the interviews, part of Xavier's objective for his field work was to film the local fisherman. The two many sources of income in this area, especially in the Seri community, are from Callo (scallops) and Jaiba (blue crab). The Jaiba are collected in baited traps and as long as they are over a certain size (but I don't know how often that is followed) there really is no limit to how many people can take. What's really interesting about Callo fishing is that they are found in pretty deep waters, which means that the fisherman actually scuba dive to collect them!

On Thursday I accompanied Xavier and a few other people on their expedition to document the Callo scuba divers. On the way out there, we stopped and talked to some jaiba fishermen. For the callo diving, Xavier had an underwater camera to film with, and his assistant was filming from the boat. The amount of physical work that it takes to collect these scallops is pretty incredible. Pretty much, the men are out there all day long alternating diving and shelling the scallops on the boat. The guy driving the boat has to watch the two divers, drive the boat, shell scallops, etc. The divers collect huge bags worth of scallops and bring them to the surface. The equipment that they use is very old and worn out, and I would definitely be nervous about scuba diving with it. The two species of Callo found here (redonda y de hacha) have very large shells, but the actual amount of meat collected is very small. In a days work, they probably collect 1000 scallops, but only the meat counts, and that doesn't equal very much, maybe 10 kilos? Cosme, our boat driver, told me that they earn around 90 pesos per kilo for callo de hacha, and maybe 200 for callo redonda. That equals about $7 and $15 respectively.We were given one of each type of scallop by the fishermen to get a closer look. You can see how little the scallop is in relation to the huge shell!