From a young age, Elena Martinez and other female residents of Aserradores, a small fishing community in eastern Nicaragua, learn to navigate the dense mangrove forest to extract a black mollusc from deep under the mud.
Every few days, they leave home at dawn to row about two kilometers (1.2 miles) in a fishing boat to the mangroves, where they crawl through gnarly branches knee-deep in mud, digging for the delicacy by hand.
While keeping food on the table, the women also help conserve the mangrove forest — a natural barrier that harbors countless animal species and protects coastal settlements from floods, tidal waves and hurricane winds.
It is hard, back-breaking work that leaves the women covered in mud from head to toe. But 40-year-old Martinez and her companions laugh and joke as they go about the task of finding mangrove cockles.
In several hours they each gather a small pile of the mollusc known to science as Anadara tuberculosa — some for home consumption, but most to sell in town.
The cockle is a popular menu item in Nicaragua and famed for purported aphrodisiac qualities.
Restaurants can resell a dozen cockles for as much as 120 cordobas (about $3.30), but the women only get about a quarter to a sixth of that price.
“Only women” do this job “because men don’t like to get dirty, they don’t like to get scratched” by the mangrove branches, said Martinez.
“We have to do it because of our children, for our children’s studies. We have to find a way to feed them,” she explained.
The men of Aserradores make a living mainly from fishing for the table and to sell. But the fish are getting fewer.
The work of Martinez and her colleagues is also important for conservation.
While digging for cockles in the Aserradores estuary more than 150 kilometers (93 miles) northwest of Managua, they deposit seedlings provided by environmental authorities and NGOs to repopulate the mangrove forest.
“What we do is protect the mangrove… we plant, we reforest,” said Martinez as she deftly dug into the mud, removed a cockle, and placed it in a bag hanging from her waist.
“It is for our own sake, that of our children and the rest” of the community, she said.
Martinez was 10 when she first started to gather cockles, at a time the finite nature of the resource was not appreciated, she said.
“Growing up, I did not consider how valuable it was… we took large amounts of shells without thinking that maybe one day they will run out and we won’t have anything with which to sustain our children.”