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Seashells components
Seashells components Ed deVaul found a Conus spiceri and two Harpa amouretta off Makua at 80' and Al Kekoa has brought up six more C. tessellata from 60-70 feet in Moanalua Bay over four weekends.
The South China Sea is a mecca for shell collectors, with many interesting shells from that area coming into our hands through Formosan fishermen and shell dealers.
We have received such rare sea shells as Erosaria guttata (Gmelin), Schilderia hirasei (Roberts), S. teramachii (Kuroda), S. langfordi (Kuroda) and Gratiadusta hungerfordi (Sowerby). Recently we got a lovely new cowry from the South China Sea. Schilderia sakuraii, described by Habe in the Bulletin of the Biogeographical Society of Japan, vol. 24, no. 10, pp. 67-69. The nearest ally is S. hirasei, but it is larger in size and has paler coloration than our new species. We have examined four specimens of S. sakuraii.
The shell is thick and heavy with rounded humped back. Dorsal surface is covered with brown clouds of densely set transverse lines and bars divided into two parts by the white line of the mantle.
In "The Living sea shells" describing Cypraea asellus, Dr. C. M. (Pat) Burgess comments: "This strikingly different small species stands out in any company. The alternating jet black and pure white dorsal bands are unmistakable." We agree with Dr. Pat that this is a beautiful shell.
Shown in the above picture are three highly unusual specimens of this small sea shell along with a standard shell (left specimen). Then there is one specimen with a solid black dorsum. Another has four black bands instead of the normal three. And at right is a brown rather than jet black shell and also with an odd pattern. These shells are all from the private collection of Iain Gower and were live collected by him in the waters of Guadalcanal.
In speaking of the rarity of these shells, Gower tells us they were selected from over twenty-five thousand specimens and were the only ones found of each type. Gower is a well known shell dealer who lives at Guadalcanal, British Solomon Islands.
Erronea barclayi has been established by Reeve in 1857 by describing an unique shell said to come from Diego Garcia, Chagos Is.; this holotype is preserved in coll. Saul in Cambridge, England (see Schilder 1932, Zoolog. Anzeiger 100:171).
The following hundred years no second specimen has been discovered, though in many collections other sea shell species erroneously have been labeled E. barclayi.
Seashells components The Wheatley specimen is slightly faded, to judge by recent descriptions; the base is white, the markings on the dorsum chestnut and the spots on the margins gray brown. The aperture is almost toothless though the specimen appears mature. Our "cowry hound," Jean Cayey pointed out a peculiarity of this specimen: a large number of the marginal spots are located in concave depressions giving the shell a dimpled appearance.
The semi-sea shell Pseudocypraea adamsonii Sowerby has been regarded as a typical West-Pacific species, as it ranges from Japan and the Marshall Is. to New Caledonia, and from the Philippines to the Tuamotu Is.; the occurrence in Mauritius indicated by Lienard (1877) has not been trusted, as Lienard's indications often proved to be false.
However, in 1964 I examined a beach shell which had been picked up at Eilath in the northernmost Red Sea and is preserved in the University of Tel Aviv, Israel (NS. 721). The hardly-worn shell (10.1mm) is a typical P. adamsonii, though the brown dorsal blotches are confluent along the margins.
Moreover, I recently received, from Mrs. Gene Webb, Nanyuki, Kenya, a small shell for identification and return, which she had collected alive on the outer coral reef at Shanzu, ten miles North of Mombasa, Kenya: it proved to be a typical P. adamsonii! The figured shell is 9.8mm long, with the usual five greyish-brown dorsal blotches and with 11 brown dots along the right margin. According to Mrs. Webb, the extended mantle of the animal was clear-yellow (a little darker than lemon-yellow).
Therefore P. adamsonii evidently is not restricted to the Pacific, but it occurs, though far less frequently, also in the Indian Ocean.
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