About the time that Round 6 of the Cone Wars ended,
it was my pleasure to welcome Betty Jean Piech and
Homer and Ann Rhode to Samoa.  We spent a lot of
time in the water and riding around the island, so I didn't
spend a tremendous amount of time watching the tank.
Still, we did observe a few interesting things while they
were here!  I'll leave most of that story for others to tell.
At least they got to meet Eduardo and Helmut.
 
I arose at the crack of noon one morning and gathered
up my snorkeling gear, and prepared to meet the other
shellers at the Rainmaker Hotel.  I decided to take a
look in the aquarium before I left, just in case anything
unusual was happening.  It was.  I had collected a pair
of bursa lamarckii the week before, and dropped them in
the tank so that Betty Jean could look at them when she
got here.  As I watched, Art Textile's anterior tip came
out of the gravel (he was almost exactly spire-down), and
pushed the bursa about half an inch off the bottom of
the aquarium, harpooning him at the same time!  I was
stunned, as it appeared that Art had either trailed the
bursa from under the gravel, or had been lying in wait for
some victim to happen into his snare.  Anyway, the
bursa attempted to shut his trap door, but the damage
was done.  Art sat there working on extracting the
bursa until I left for the hotel.  I wondered: are cypraea
really the prey of choice for the molluscivorous cones?
I had seen a conus omaria attack a nassarius on dry
land a few weeks before...
 
When I returned from snorkeling, I brought a handful of
cypraea isabellas and erosas, plus a couple of other
small cowries and dropped them in the tank.  Art was
no longer visible, and the bursa lamarckii was back in
his normal position.  I couldn't resist seeing whether
Art had been successful, so I got my tongs and fished
the bursa out of the aquarium.  He wasn't completely
eaten, but Art had managed to remove about half of
his foot.  I took the bursa over to the sink to see if I
could get the rest of the animal out with a dental pick,
and I did.  The animal seemed to be semi-dissolved,
at least at the attachment points, and the entire
animal came out of the shell with almost no effort,
covered with slime.  I have seen cones extract cowries
so completely that there was absolutely nothing left in
the shell, but it's quite a task for us humans to do the
same thing on a fresh animal.  Art seems to know a
few tricks that I don't know.
 
I went back to the aquarium to look for the bursa's
operculum, expecting to either have to dig for it or
choke it out of Art.  Instead, there it was, only a short
distance from where the bursa had been lying.  I man-
aged to snag it with the tongs also, and put it in a bag
with the bursa lamarckii.  (These two bursa lamarckii
are the only ones I've seen in over three years here.)
I gave the bursa to Betty Jean, complete with it's data
slip/death certificate from Don's Aquarium.
 
Although I hadn't seen much of Paul Textile since I
had put him in the aquarium (actually, I hadn't seen
him at all), the Omaria brothers, Andy and Gary, had
been quite active.  They were out practically every
night, with Gary preferring to cruise the rocks and
clumps of halomeda on the bottom of the tank, while
Andy spent a lot of time climbing the walls.  Eduardo
was right there with them, and Ross Canonicus even
joined the hunt occasionally.  Nobody seemed to
have much luck while I was watching, but with the
introduction of different cowry species into the tank,
things began to change.  Every morning when I'd
check the aquarium before going to work or off to
meet the others to go shelling, there would be one
or two freshly-killed cowries in the tank.  While my
visitors were here, I removed 14 empty cowry shells
from the aquarium!  The preference was definitely for
cypraea isabella, with eight of them being eaten,
along with five erosas and a single caurica.  The
population of cones in the tank at this time consis-
ted of two textiles, two omarias, one canonicus,
and one magnificus.
 
By proximity, I could guess who had probably eaten
several of the cowries.  Although I couldn't blame
Andy for any of the kills, Gary Omaria had taken up
residence in one of the clumps of halomeda, and I
strongly suspect that he ate an erosa and an isabella
whose shells ended up in the same clump.  It seems
like his strategy of letting the prey come to him was
more successful than brother Andy's head-on approach.
Several empty cowry shells appeared in the middle
of the open gravel over a short time period, and I am
fairly certain that these were Art and Paul's ambush
victims, assuming the attack on the bursa lamarckii
was typical conus textile behavior.
 
Eduardo had put on a couple of millimeters of new lip
growth during this time, so he evidently had been
catching his share of the cowries, even if the menu
still didn't include cypraea lynx. (Helmut had established
a new residence in one of the corners near the top of
the tank.)  On the supposed last night of my visitors'
Samoan holiday (had the flight not been cancelled), we
finally had the chance to witness Eduardo in action.
 
I turned the aquarium light off as soon as I found out
that the Rhodes' and Betty Jean were going to be with
us another night, in hopes that they might get to witness
some activity in the tank.  Sure enough, Eduardo came
out of hiding, and started slowly up one of the corners
of the aquarium, directly below a cypraea erosa.  As
Betty Jean said, "You can't really tell that he's moving,
but the space between Eduardo and the cowry is shrinking."
Eduardo continued the slow-motion stalking until he was
within about an inch of the cowry, then extended his red
proboscis as far as it would reach, and harpooned the
hapless erosa.  The erosa immediately fell to the bottom
of the tank, but Eduardo didn't seem to know exactly
what had happened to the cowry.  He turned around and
started moving sideways initially, then slowly turned
toward the bottom of the tank.  It appeared that he did
indeed know where the cowry was after all, but then he
did a course reversal and acted like he was going to
resume his hunt at the top of the tank.  By this time it
was getting late, and the paralyzed erosa wasn't looking
so healthy, so I pointed Eduardo in the right direction
(I punched him off the wall of the aquarium).  Once on
the bottom, it only took Eduardo a couple of seconds
to realize where the cowry was, and in a very short time
he was working on extracting the cowry from its shell.
I expected him to engulf the shell, but he didn't.  He
formed a semi-circular ring around the basal margin
of the erosa with his foot, giving him something to push
against.  Within about 35 minutes, he had completely
emptied the shell.
 
I had assumed that he would immediately bury himself
after eating, but not Eduardo.  He resumed his hunting
for the next hour, then finally decided to call it a night.
He only took the next day off from his hunting, then was
back to his normal rounds by the second day.  It was
beginning to appear that the cones in my aquarium had
no interest in each other, each one having staked his
territory and going about his business night after night.
It continued this way until I got a call at work from my
wife, who told me that Chuck Brugman had just caught
a "big marmoreus" (it was a bandanus) and had put it
in my tank...
 
(Round 8 coming soon...)
 
Cheers,
 
 
 
Don