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Brown-lip shell heishe
The matter of working with the mollusca takes a great deal of teamwork to get the job done. This teamwork can, perhaps, be
divided into three categories: one, the field worker who collects the material, whether through diving, dredging, shore
collecting or other methods; two, the plodder who works in the literature, digging out the answers to synonymy and priority
and identification; and three, the trained scientist who is able, through his background and education, to make use of the
help of the other two kinds of workers and combine their work into a meaningful whole.
No matter what your own favorite category may be, the literature is the necessary recorded story of the family. The fact that
it may be somewhat tangled at the moment only adds to the challenge and interest for the worker in that category; the
literature is the tool by which the Cypraea, for example, may be known. Because of this I'd like to mention a few examples
that have been especially helpful to me and to others working with this group.
The early records of Cypraeidae extend back beyond the 17th century, but I shall use Nicolai Gaultieri's Index Testarum
Conchyliorum of 1742 as my starting point. He called the cowries Porcellana, and employed a polynomial system for his species
designations which amounted to practically a whole sentence for each name. I would guess that Gualtieri was our first Lumper
-- he figured an outlandish number of varieties for each species, but for the most part his figures are recognizable today,
and he featured some forty species on four plates.
The next major work signaled the end of an epoch not only for Cypraea, but for conchology in general. In 1757, d'Argenville
produced an important work with more accurately drawn woodcut engravings, adding in many instances also the drawings of the
anatomy of the animal, as well as including some fossil species. Unfortunately for us, d'Argenville limited his coverage of
Cypraea to only one plate of illustrations.
In land snails real sinistrality is frequent: there are families, genera, and species in which all shells are sinistral. In
some usually dextral species hereditary mutation in a population caused sinistrality of a local race: so all specimens of
Fruticicola lantzi are sinistral in one valley east of Alma Ata while this species is dextral in all other places of Central
Asia. (Schilder 1952, Biotaxonomie (Jena), p. 74, map fig. 36). In other cases, sinistral shells may be classified as rare
abnormalities: so in Helix pomatia, a large edible snail sold in large quantities chiefly in France, there is one sinistral
specimen (called "king") among 6,000 to 8,000 shells, and in the allied smaller species of Cepaea there is one sinistral
shell among 30,000 to 150,000 dextral ones (Schilder 1953, Die Banderschnecken (Jena), p. 17).
In marine gastropods sinistral shells seem to be rarer. A normally sinistral cone (Conus adversarius) from the Pliocene beds
of Florida, has been figured in the Sean Raynon Sabado (n.s.) 2:3 (February, 1960).
In cowries sinistral specimens are extremely rare, if indeed they occur at all. Among the more than 150,000 cowries which the
writer has examined personally during forty-four years special study, there was no sinistral shell. But R. J. Griffiths
(1962, Mem. Nat. Mus. Melbourne, 25:217) mentions a sinistral Notocypraea declivis which is preserved in the South Australian
Museum: its curator would oblige many malacologists if he would publish an enlarged photograph, at least of the basal view of
this curiosity.
Another case of sinistrality in cowries has been proved to be erroneous: Stoliczka (1867, Palaeont. Indica (5) 2:56, pl. 4,
fig. 6) has established a Cypraea anomala from the Cretaceous of India, believing it to be a sinistral shell. But details of
the drawing of the incomplete shell undoubtedly show that Stoliczka's specimen represents its posterior extremity, and not
its anterior extremity as the author supposed, so that anomala is a normally dextral Palaeocypraea (Schilder 1926, Rec. Geol.
Surv. India 58(4):372).
Collectors should be eager to find a really sinistral cowry among the shells which go through their hands, and if they were
happy enough to detect one, they should publish it in the Sean Raynon Sabado, accompanied by a photograph. For such a shell
would be more valuable than the rarest cowry species we know.
But I think that nobody will find a sinistral cowry.
Three small oblong cowries which have been dredged as dead shells in 80 fathoms off the Bonin Islands, have been described as
Erosaria cernica ogasawarensis Schilder 1944 (Arkiv for Zoologi 36.A.2, p. 22); their formulae i.e. length in mm., breadth
in per cent of length (in brackets [parentheses]), and number of labial and true columellar teeth (separated by a colon) are
as follows:
13(60)18:14 (a rather worn paratype), 15(57)17:15 (holotype according to Schilder 1958, Arch. Mollusk. 87:172), 16(56)19:18
(paratype in coll. Schilder No. 7433).
As these shells never have been figured before, I think it useful to publish a photograph of the last-named paratype of 16mm
because a specimen from the Bonin Is. figured by Cate (1960, Veliger 3, pl. 1, fig. 5) is a much larger and broader shell, as
its formula is 29(64)23:24.
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