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