hell collector seems an inadequate title for a man who has 5,000 shells from all of the major oceans, which is why Jack Lightbourn refers to himself as an amateur conchologist. (To be a professional would require various marine biology degrees from a university.) The best of Mr. Lightbourn?s collection can be seen at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI), where he is a lifetime trustee. Those who haven?t the time to go to the BUEI can take a quick look through the mail. Mr. Lightbourn?s shells have been featured on 20 different Bermuda stamps.

?I started collecting shells when I was 11 years old,? said Mr. Lightbourn from ?Shellbourne? his room in Hamilton Parish. Many of the rooms in Shellbourne are lined with glass cabinets holding his collection. Shelves that don?t have shells, have other marine objects such as museum quality model ships or glass fishing lures.

?In those days you could collect coral shells and seafans and things like that,? he said. ?I use to go with my grandfather to collect things for his store near the old railway station since the time I was four. When I was 11 I joined the Sea Scouts and started to collect and kept on collecting. I made it a lifetime hobby.?

Mr. Lightbourn still has a moon shell he collected in 1936, but it is now part of a collection of around 5,000 shells.

Although many people picture a shell collector hunched over, looking intently at the sand on a beach, Mr. Lightbourn said he has never operated this way.

?I haven?t collected anything from off the beaches, because I don?t collect the minute, little, tiny fellows,? he said. ?Bermuda beaches are only good for collecting shells if you are interested in collecting the microshells. These are little things that are smaller than a quarter of an inch.

?This is because most of our beaches are on the South Shore. The beaches are steep. The shells die or get killed and get broken up in the rocks. They seldom get washed onto the beach.?

Mr. Lightbourn?s shell collecting technique started out in a basic way. ?I began by going offshore in a little punt,? he said. ?I would go around the shoals and rocky areas, because that is where you find shells and other places where you have grass and sand. Different shells live in different environments.?

To locate particular kinds of shells he would have to do a lot of research before-hand.

?You try to read as much as you can from books,? said Mr. Lightbourn. ?Different shells have different habitats so if you want to collect things like Murex, for example, they don?t live in the sand.

?There are exceptions and they do stray and walk around like other things, but there are places we know they will naturally live.?

He often collected shells with his friend the late Arthur Guest. After a few years they quickly found everything that was known to exist in Bermuda waters. To find new shells Mr. Lightbourn and Mr. Guest had to be inventive. Instead of looking for the shells, they created a way for the shells to come to them.

?I read an article about people who had used traps in Hawaii to get shells,? said Mr. Lightbourn.

Mr. Lightbourn designed a special pot that would allow for shellbearing creatures to get in, but would not trap small fish. The molluscs that Mr. Lightbourn was after in Bermuda waters, could not be baited because ate algae. However, after the creature died, the shell was often taken over by a hermit crab, and crabs which be baited.

?In 23 years we never collected one single shell with its natural living animal,? said Mr. Lightbourn. ?We baited our pots with fish, meat, bones and chicken in particular, because the crabs will feed after that. Once the bait was eaten the crab would slip out of the shell and out of the fish pot and go and find another home.?

Octopus lairs are also a good place to find empty shells, Mr. Lightbourn said.

?The octopus sucks the animal out and doesn?t break up the shell, so you can go to an octopus lair and pick what you want,? he said. ?You don?t decimate the population.?

Using these methods Mr. Lightbourn and Mr. Guest broke their dry spell and went on to add 300 names to the list of Bermuda shells, ten of which were new to science.

Sadly, Mr. Lightbourn has found shell collecting to be a lonely hobby in Bermuda. He doesn?t know many other Bermudians who collect shells to the level that he does. Perhaps for this reason, he joined the Conchologists of America (COA).

One of his Bermuda discoveries ? a delicate little shell he called Pterynotus lightbourni recently won an award at a COA convention in Fort Myers, Florida. ?When you enter the shell shows they usually will have a dozen different scenarios,? said Mr. Lightbourn. ?You can enter a collection of one family of shells, or you can have world-wide categories, or worldwide self-collected. I have never gone in for that. It is a lot of difficulty preparing all those things, taking them off the island and then bringing them back. They have to be wrapped and unwrapped several times.

?When the COA have a convention they only have limited displays and you can only put one shell in. For this show it was according to the oceans of the world. I entered mine for the Atlantic North America category.?

Shells are judged mainly on their rarity. The number of other shells out there like it determine its value. ?We often say that the rarity of a shell depends largely on when you find its breeding place,? said Mr. Lightbourn. ?Lots of people will find one shell all of a sudden. Then people are working the area and then it is not quite so plentiful.?

There are only seven known examples of Mr. Lightbourn?s winning shell Pterynotus lightbourni, all of which were found by Mr. Lightbourn. One is in the Smithsonian museum in Washington D.C., another is in the Museum of Natural History in Delaware, a third is in the Royal Ontario Museum and a fourth can be seen at the BUEI.

In dog shows, handlers get points if the dog conforms to a standard, but in shell shows it is just the opposite. Shells that are unusual, say three times as large as the average shell of that type, get extra points.

?You don?t necessarily get points for a shell being very large, not unless it is unusual to be that size,? he said. ?Of all the shells at this show, most of the ones that received the prizes were the very small ones. It was mostly because they came out of very deep water. They are very hard to collect, and there aren?t many of them in existence.?

Some shell collectors favour dredging the ocean bottom as a way to find things, but Mr. Lightbourn said with this method there is always the danger that something fragile like Pterynotus lightbourni would be damaged. ?That is why we favour the trapping, because if a good shell is brought in there you don?t knock it around,? he said. ?Dredging is one thing if you are dredging in sand because the sand will help to protect it. But dredging in Bermuda is difficult because much of the ocean bottom is rocky, and where there is sand, I don?t think dredging is really permissible. I have never had to do it that way anyway because I can find anything I want by diving.?

Conchology is not without its hazards ? namely sharks. Mr. Lightbourn likes to give them a wide berth.

?When you are diving in the water the thing to remember is that you are the stranger,? he said. ?The fish... the sharks... the morays... that is their natural habitat and they are at home. Be aware of that. If you go shoving your hand in holes you are apt to get bitten. If you see a moray just go quietly around him and leave him alone. If you see a shark, do the same thing and then get out of the water and go to another place.

?A lot of people say sharks won?t hurt you and so forth, and an awful lot of people swim around sharks and haven?t had any problem. But sharks can give you a nasty bite. Once they have tasted blood you better be prepared to get out fast.?

In addition to diving, Mr. Lightbourn has also used a submersible to pick-up shells at lower depths. ?I have done that about three different occasions,? he said. ?I have had seven dives altogether. Sometimes we had more than one person sponsoring it. It is rather an expensive hobby. When we do that we really only look for the rarer shells or a better specimen of something that we have. The emphasis is to get into the deep water where normally you can?t get with diving or scuba. I got several nice shells as a consequence of that. I have them on display at BUEI.?

While many conchologists like to trade shells, Mr. Lightbourn said he has only done this about six times. ?I have done very little trading because there are very few things in Bermuda that are rare,? he said. ?And what is rare, I wouldn?t want to trade.?

When Mr. Lightbourn?s friend Mr. Guest passed away a few years ago he left his entire shell collection to Mr. Lightbourn. In turn, Mr. Lightbourn donated it to the Bermuda Zoological Society. Between the two men they had the largest collection of shells ever assembled in Bermuda. ?The Zoological Society will probably use that for their reference collection, because it is almost double the size of any previous one they ever had,? he said.