Hi Again,
 
With all the lights out except for the light in the kitchen,
Mark ailing, Tom buried, and Art licking his chops over an
expected erosa dinner, Ross Canonicus and Eduardo
Magnificus suddenly showed signs of life.  My experience
with conus magnificus in a collecting bag has always
shown them to be rather shy, and conus canonicus is
usually not much more active.  Eduardo would change
my opinion over the next few days, however.
 
After several motionless hours, Ross decided to explore
his new surroundings a bit.  He slowly climbed the wall
of the aquarium, and cautiously approached the line of
cowries near the water's surface.  He stopped just short
of the first cypraea caurica, and extended his siphon to
within a few millimeters of the cowry, but never made any
attempt to harpoon it.  After a few minutes, he moved
around the unconcerned caurica and headed for the next
cowry in the line.  This time he appeared to make a half-
hearted attempt at catching the caurica, but the cowry
wasn't nearly as disturbed by his presence as it had
been by Art's approach.  It slowly moved away, and the
canonicus didn't follow.  Ross simply meandered around
the walls of the tank, and eventually crawled back down
and staked his claim on one of the corners at the bottom
of the aquarium.
 
Eduardo hit the glass like he was hungry, and actually
out-climbed all of the other cones in the tank.  He didn't
move nearly as fast as the cowries, but he was quite
a bit faster than Art, maybe simply because he wasn't
tentative, or maybe all the cowry activity had excited
him.  In any case, he went straight to the top of the
aquarium and rushed up to one of the big cypraea
arabicas, which simply ignored him.  Eduardo only
paused for a moment, evidently discounting his chances,
and then moved on over to the next cowry, which was
the little fellow with three quarters of a foot that he
had harpooned earlier in the day.  Eduardo gave this
one a closer inspection, but the caurica's trick that
had worked on Art and Tom appeared likely to be
successful yet again.  He was still parallel to the
water line, with most of his foot out of the water and
the lower side of his shell against the glass.  Eduardo
was considering what his plan of action was going to
be, when around the corner came Helmut.
 
Now, Helmut, the cypraea lynx, had already pulled
both Art and Tom off the glass this night by climbing
up on each one's dorsum and allowing his weight to
break the cone's hold on the aquarium wall.  Would
he do the same thing to Eduardo?  Amazingly enough,
yes.  Helmut approached Eduardo from the side, and
Eduardo saw him coming.  He turned slightly toward
Helmut, but the cowry never hesitated.  Straight over
Eduardo's foot, crumpling his siphon, onto his back...
then he just stopped.  Eduardo seemed to try to turn
or tilt his shell away from Helmut's weight, but in a
matter of a few seconds, both were headed for the
gravel.  Once on the bottom, Helmut quickly crawled
over to the glass and resumed making his rounds,
and Eduardo wasn't far behind.  Eduardo seemed to
have the best memory of all the cones (or else he just
holds a grudge), as he devoted the next few days to
ONLY chasing Helmut, completely ignoring the other
cowries.
 
The bane of all the molluscs' existence in my tank has
been one blue-and-yellow, inch-long, aggressive little
damsel fish.  The first thing he discovered about all
the cones in the aquarium is that they have little red
bites of food attached to these tubes that protrude
from the front of the shell, and he felt obliged to try to
remove it from every cone in the tank!  (All of these
cones are related, and each one has a banded siphon,
red at the tip, with a white ring behind the red, and a
black ring behing the white one.)  It almost made me
wish one of them had been a conus geographus.
After Eduardo's tumble, the fish harassed him for half
an hour, alternating between him and his cousins.
Then, for good measure, he zipped up to Helmut, and
bit his left eye stalk off!  I seem to recall a story of
someone keeping a cypraea testudinaria that regen-
erated an apparently-functional eyestalk in his tank
(Scott Johnson in Kwajalein?), so maybe I'll see if a
cypraea lynx can do the same, assuming he survives.
I was beginning to believe that Helmut was going to
be at some disadvantage against Eduardo with only
one eye--when I noticed that Eduardo's right eye
was missing!  I determined to remove the mean little
fish the next day, but he has completely ignored the
molluscs since that night, so I decided to let him
stay.
 
By now I was fairly confident that nobody was going
to become dinner this night, so I decided it was time
to go to bed.  As it turned out, I was mostly correct.
The next morning, I went to the aquarium and counted
cowries to see how everyone had fared overnight.  I
saw Helmut down in a corner behind some grass,
and there were the arabicas huddled at the top of the
aquarium.  The juvenile talpa had tucked himself into
some branch coral, and the erosa was near the spot
I had left him.  The cauricas were spread all over the
aquarium, and I counted them: one, two, three, four,
five...wait a minute, one, two, three, four, five... Yep,
my aquarium had generated one additional cypraea
caurica overnight.  I had only brought home four, so
I can only guess that there was one in the clump of
grass that I had brought in for the fish to graze on!
 
Mark was still where he had been the night before,
and Tom was still mostly buried.  Ross remained in
the back corner of the tank, and Art and Eduardo
had both gone underground.
 
(...to be continued, again...)
 
 
Cheers,
 
 
 
 
Don