Cavechat.org

I am seeing what seems to be a large growth in the increase of cave formations for sell on E-bay. If you search cave formations on E-bay, you will see many for sell.
It appears that the majority of these are from caves of Mexico. Unfortunately our caver conservation laws have no jurisdiction here. I wish our politicians could encourage places like this to preserve their caves as we have. It's sickening to think that these formations will soon become a book holder or a decoration in someone's house. Even more sad that huge cave crystals among other beautiful and rare formations are going as low as 10 and 20 dollars and are now forever gone.
Just my rant for the day.

Perhaps there should be some sort of protection afforded to wild animals; that is for many wild animals, it is not legal to sell any part of such animal in this country. That would not be a bad idea to promote. I have visited the rock shows, and seen some dealers, supposedly from out of the country that specialized in cave formations selling large chunks from caves. Regards, Al Copley 20845

I share your rant, Shane. The formations will be dried up and look like you know what in a few years, so what is it that makes fools remove formations, I wonder?

Ernie Coffman wrote:I share your rant, Shane. The formations will be dried up and look like you know what in a few years, so what is it that makes fools remove formations, I wonder?

$$$

I still recall many years ago driving to Mammoth Cave and seeing the rock sellers on the roadside along the way. Many of them were peddling so-called "cave rocks," which were no more than foundry slag material. People will sell anything there is a market for. I suppose I'd rather them sell foundry slag than real cave rocks.

I haven't been that way in a while- does anyone know if they still do this?

Trogman

Two years ago when I took my son yes they were still there. Unfortunately,

Some of what is labeled as cave formations on eBay, doesn't really appear to be our traditional cave formations. Some of this material to me appears to be coming out of "pockets" in mines, which I think the miners may refer to as caves.

And, sometimes the two just merge together. i.e. mines encounter limestone voids that we really would think of as caves, but they are being mined away by the process of mining.

I just don't know how you can regulate this, unfortunately.

Larry E. Matthews
NSS @6792-F

That makes sense. I know of a silica mine in Summerville Ga. I have done some rockhounding there myself and have found many obvious cave formation remains. I have a few popcorn pieces from there. My guess is that the mine dug through a pre existing cave. I guess the best way of prevention is cave management, not letting irresponsible people have cave locations.