Please note that the role of shell collecting is exaggerated in the press coverage, including news reports with titles implying that our paper documents shell loss due to shell collecting. This is not correct. Our paper explores links between tourism-related activities and decline in shell abundance. These tourism-related processes include also use of recreational vehicles, beach grooming (often with heavy machinery), boat landing, trampling, and so on. At this point we lack robust estimates of relative importance played by different tourism-related processes that may be contributing to shell removal or destruction. This is discussed in detail in the section “Active collecting versus other shell removal processes” (see p. 7 of the paper).