Hi All,
 
I did finally get the aquarium set up, and have been catching
fish for it for the past three days.  I finally went out to catch
some cones this afternoon, and caught most of the ones that
I was hunting.
 
I now have one conus textile, about 80mm ("Art"), one conus
magnificus, 70mm ("Eduardo"), one conus episcopatus, about
65mm ("Tom"), another episcopatus about 55mm ("Mark"),
and a conus canonicus, 50mm ("Ross").  I still plan to put an
omaria or two in the tank, and a couple bandanus.  I'll have to
make a trip to get a nice sized marmoreus for my experiment:
I don't think a 30mm bandanus is a fair fight against an 80mm
textile.
 
To keep the guys from becoming unnecessarily cannibalistic,
I also caught some cowries today, all but one of which is now
crawling circles around the tank.  I collected one cypraea talpa,
one lynx, four cauricas, one erosa, and four arabicas, plus a
handful of annulus and moneta cowries.  I caught a few other
cones too (catus, sanguinolentus, capitaneus) but decided not
to include them in the equation.
 
I didn't even get all the animals in the aquarium before I saw
something I'd never seen before.  In my collecting bottle, my
shy magnicus, Eduardo, snaked out his proboscis and stung
one of the cypraea cauricas!  And he did this while he was
FULLY RETRACTED into his shell!!!  He didn't eat the cowry,
as I was in the process of moving them into the aquarium.  I
dumped Eduardo's victim into the tank anyway, just to see
what would happen.  The caurica partially retracted into his
shell, but it almost looked like he wouldn't fit.  He proceeded
to autotomize about the posterior 25% of his foot!  I've seen
harps do this, as well as several species of nudibranchs, but
never cowries.  He then remained on the bottom of the tank,
motionless, for the next two hours.  I went and bought lobsters
for dinner, removed the tails, and then fabricated a little scoop
to get the dead cowry out of the tank, but...when I went in
to remove him, he wasn't where I had left him.  In fact, he had
crawled to the top of the tank.  It wasn't hard to tell which one
he was, as only one of the cowries was missing a quarter of
his foot!
 
More updates as the saga unfolds.
 
Sorry not to include any philosophical or morality statements,
only shell stuff in this post.  Disclaimer:  Character names are
all purely fictitious.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead, is purely coincidental...
 
Cheers from Pago Pago,
 
 
 
 
Don