Fighting conch with lime as prepared in Bocas del Toro, Panama. (Felix Rodriguez, STRI) The next time you eat seafood, think about the long-term effects. Will consistently eating the biggest fish or the biggest conch mean that only the smaller individuals will have a chance to reproduce? In Wonderland, Alice drank a potion to shrink herself. In nature, some animal species shrink to escape the attention of human hunters, a process that takes from decades to millennia. To begin to understand the genetics of shrinking, scientists successfully extracted DNA from marine shells collected at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. Their new technique will not only shed light on how animals from lizards to lemurs shrink, it will reveal many other stories hidden in shells.