A Keys visitor took queen conch from the ocean, police say — and it landed her in jail

A Georgia woman was jailed Sunday after state wildlife police said she took five queen conch from the ocean in Key West.

The mollusks have been illegal to keep in Florida since the 1970s.

Daniela Arroyo Mondragon, 24, of Statham, Georgia, was with her family at Higgs Beach when someone reported to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission that he had seen her harvesting queen conch near the Edward B. Knight Pier off White Street and hiding them under a towel by the West Martello Tower, police said.

FWC Lt. Josh Peters responded and said he watched with binoculars Arroyo Mondragon and her family taking the conch from the water, and later told her a witness said she was placing the shells beneath a towel.

“She did not deny this,” Peters wrote in a report released by agency spokesman Bobby Dube.

She said she was with her family and “they started feeling stuff at their feet,” Peters wrote. “They put the shells up under the towel.”

Arroyo Mondragon agreed to speak with Peters and “said that the kids harvested all the shells and she never touched them,” Peters wrote.

Peters said Arroyo Mondragon had no ties to Monroe County and did not meet the criteria to receive a notice to appear in court. Instead, she was arrested and taken to the county jail on Stock Island. She faces five misdemeanor counts of taking conch.

She was released from jail the same day without having to post a bond. She couldn’t be reached for comment Tuesday.

Queen conch used to be found in high numbers in the Keys. But after a collapse in conch fisheries in the 1970s, it became illegal to commercially or recreationally harvest the mollusks in Florida, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

It is not illegal to possess queen conch shells in Florida as long as the shells do not contain any living queen conch at the time of collection and the living queen conch is not killed or removed from its shell prior to collection, Fish and Wildlife says on its website.

In 2020, a Georgia man was sentenced to two days in jail and a year of probation for harvesting 10 queen conch in 2017.

A Texas woman in 2018 was given 15 days in jail for taking 40 queen conch from the water in Key West a year before.

This story was originally published June 1, 2021 at 4:30 PM.

Gwen Filosa

Miami Herald

Gwen Filosa covers Key West and the Lower Florida Keys for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald and lives in Key West. She was part of the staff at the New Orleans Times-Picayune that in 2005 won two Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She graduated from Indiana University.