Hi 'L'ers, And so it goes. Everyone seemed to have survived the night, even if Mark Episcopatus hadn't moved. I could still see his siphon, and it even retracted a little occa- sionally, so I took that as an encouraging sign. As I looked more closely at the cypraea erosa that Art had staked out the night before, I couldn't see any mantle exposed, so I decided to remove him from the tank and give him a physical. As I suspected, only an empty cowry shell remained. Looks like Art had his erosa dinner after all! Everything remained calm in the aquarium the rest of the day. The cowries stayed parked in the same spots, with the arabicas at the top of the tank, Helmut Lynx in the corner behind a clump of grass, and the others scattered around at random. As the evening wore on, I closed the window blinds and turned out the aquarium lamp, and waited to see if the action would pick up. It did. Within two minutes after extinguishing the light, Eduardo came bursting out of the rubble, and headed straight for Helmut without any hesitation. I grabbed my camera, and waited to see what would happen. Eduardo crawled directly onto Helmut's dorsum and extended his long, red proboscis around the cowry's shell. Helmut was still completely retracted into his shell, but sensed immediately that something was wrong. He went from being totally withdrawn to having his entire foot extended in a matter of only two or three seconds (awfully fast for a cowry). Helmut started trying to climb the glass, and indeed was lifting the conus magnificus off the bottom, when Eduardo moved his proboscis around to Helmut's head. I thought, "This is it for poor Helmut," and snapped a photo. The rule that the act of observing an event may actually affect its outcome certainly applied here, but not in the same sense that the physicists would apply it. The flash stunned Eduardo for just a moment, long enough for Helmut to gain an inch of vertical glass and dump Eduardo off in the gravel. Having narrowly escaped, Helmut cruised around the tank the rest of the evening, never letting Eduardo get near him. Eduardo remained active, and followed Helmut's trail for hours. Several times he passed very near the other cowries, but showed absolutely no in- terest. Eventually, Eduardo returned to the bottom of the aquarium, apparently resigned to the fact that this was not the day that he would catch Helmut. He sat feigning interest in a clump of branch coral until I went to bed. Art never resurfaced. I'm not sure how long a conus textile will remain buried after he's eaten, or even how often they feed, but it looks like a good chance to find out. Tom did finally resurface, but never showed any- where near the interest in chasing cowries that he had shown the night before. And Ross meandered around the aquarium a bit too, but he also seemed less than excited. Maybe the lack of fresh cowry trails everywhere made the not-quite-so-new surround- ings seem more normal? With things settling down and the cowries on patrol, I decided to call it a night. The only other thing I had noticed was that my little puffer had now started to follow the damsel fish's example, and had begun to nip at both the cowries and the cones. I decided to remove him, and returned him to his ocean home. The next morning when I took inventory, it was much the same as the day before. Eduardo and Art were still buried, and so was Tom. Even Mark was now half-buried, about six inches from where he had spent the past two days! Only Ross was exposed, and had the anterior part of his shell inserted into the aperture of the juvenile cypraea talpa. Helmut had found a new perch at the top of the aquarium in one of the front corners, and the other cowries were once again distributed around the tank. The only thing that was amiss was a single, empty cypraea moneta shell, obviously someone's meal from the night before. Ross and the juvenile talpa were still in the same positions late in the afternoon. Curiosity finally got the better of me, and I took my tongs and extracted the talpa from the tank. It was very dead, but only half eaten. I don't know if the fish had eaten on the cowry, or some of the tiny hermit crabs, or if Ross had enjoyed some success himself. If Ross was the perpetrator, he certainly didn't do the extraction job that the molluscivorous cones usually do on cowries. Then again, Ross is relatively small, and the cowry fairly large. He certainly seemed to have shown some interest in the cypraea talpa, though, judging by their positions, whether the cowry was living or already dead. Once again the daylight hours went by peacefully, and only when the lights were out did the aquarium come to life again. (...to be continued...) Cheers, Don