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