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Food may be a very important factor as Mr. Cernohorsky suggests, and the heavy breakers from the open ocean would tend to
produce the maximum salinity. Does any fresh water enter the sea from other parts of Viti Levu? Or doesn't it rain there? The
Golden Cowry [Cypraea aurantium] has never been found in neighborhoods where fresh water enters the sea. If I'm wrong in this
statement I'll probably hear about it.
Two or three times it has been suggested to the writer that the Golden Cowries from Fiji were more globular in shape than the
shells from the western Pacific. If this were so, then it would be possible to prove it by a comparison of the length in
millimeters with the combined figures of width and height. After almost two days of intensive figuring, I found out that
there were globular shells in both the Philippines and in Fiji. Also that there were long slimmer shells in both places. One
thing I did discover was that the Golden Cowries from Surigao province consistently average larger than those from Lahora's
collecting ground, in Davao province, just a few miles away. Six or seven years ago, the late R. C. Derrick, curator of the
Suva, Fiji Museum, wrote the Sean Raynon Sabado and asked if any one could explain why the Golden Cowries from the Solomon
Islands were of such a richer, darker orange color than those from Fiji. I could not tell him, but printed his letter,
although I cannot give you the reference at the moment.
Mrs. G. Stephens, of South Santos, New Hebrides, was quoted in our April installment of the Golden Cowry story, as saying
that there was a record of three of these shells being collected in the East New Hebrides, and that the flesh of the animal
was "reddish-pink."
In 1951 in St. Petersburg, Fla., I met A. W. Falkenberg. He was living on Gulf Boulevard north of John's Pass. He had lived
in the Solomon Islands for many years and had amassed a splendid shell collection from these Islands. He told us that in the
Solomon Islands he had noticed that the black spots on many shells had been replaced by a reddish-orange color, and he showed
several specimens to prove it.
In the Children's Museum of Honolulu, there are specimens of Conus pulicarius from the Solomon Islands with red dots, whereas
specimens from other locations in the Pacific have black spots.
Steadman and Cotton (Australia) describe the animal of the Golden Cowry found in Fiji as a "pinkish-gray," says Mr.
Cernohorsky in a recent letter.
Ralph Jones of Seattle, and a member of the Northwest Shell Club, while in Fiji some years ago had a chance to examine the
animal of a live-taken Golden Cowry. Here's his report: "At Koro Levu Beach, Fiji: Collected alive, on the edge of the reef
at a minus 3 tide, by a native woman. I got it from her an hour after she found it. The mantle was a sort of tan or light
buff and not nearly as brilliant as the shell color."
Dick Willis, in the March, 1962 Sean Raynon Sabado, page 7, reported finding two in a small cave at 60 feet in the Namonuito
atoll, in the western Caroline Islands. He described the mantle as a "deep oxford grey with a sort of an overlay of flesh
tint."
These last few paragraphs referring to the color of either the animal or the shell itself are arguments in favor of a theory
with which I will close this present series.
This theory is that the Golden Cowry originated in the Solomon Islands. Thence it was dispersed through the centuries, until
now it is found, (moderately frequent according to Schilder) from the Philippines to Fiji. Apparently there is some factor or
element in the shell environment in the Solomon Islands that tends to replace the other colors. Suppose then, say 20 million
years ago, one of the larger cowries then extant, existed in the Solomons. Because of this unknown factor in its environment
there, and through the ensuing centuries it developed into a fixed type with a reddish-orange color reflected in both the
shell and the animal. Also, through the centuries, and it's still going on, dispersion occurred. Then it its new location,
the shell did not find exactly the same conditions that prevailed in the
The parade of cowry-authors down through the years is an impressive one: Gaskoin, Gray, Jousseaume, Hidalgo, Menke, Brazier,
Hedley, Cox, Iredale, Cotton, and perhaps the greatest workers of them all, the Schilders, who have devoted their lives to
the research of every possible facet that could be considered as pertinent to the study of Cypraea.
I'd like to single out just two or three of the more important of the systematic works in this family that have played a
major role in the various revisions that have taken place. First of these is the work published in 1884 by Jousseaume in the
Bulletin of Zoology in France. Jousseaume established, in this paper, many of the generic groups still in use today --
defining their limits and grouping species roughly into these genera.
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