It's been wonderful.  Thanks.
 
Marlo
Florida
 
Don Barclay wrote:
 
> 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
 
 
 
--
Marlo
Merritt Island, Florida
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