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Casis cornuta
You will note that Area 4 is about 18 feet (3 fathoms) deeper than the area immediately off-shore. In this deep water (12
fathoms) lies a large expanse of deep sand in constantly moving windrows. This area has produced only sand dwellers common in
most such habitats of Philippines. The only exceptional shell collected from this area were quite large Terebra maculata.
Area 5 is also quite barren since it is basically deep coral in heavy windrows. Trochus intextus and Turbo intercostalis are
the only shells found regularly in this area. Both shells being quite common in areas much easier to collect from than this.
In a sand patch between two windrows of coral I did collect my first live Tonna perdix and, in another nearby spot, my first
live Tritonalia tritonis. On the inshore edge of this area I also collected a dead specimen of Murex elongatus. The second
specimen of this shell found at Barber's Point was collected along the dashed line just under the letter "n" in pipeline.
The species was established by Duclos in 1833 (Mag. de Zool., Mollusqu., Paris), and illustrated on page 26. Monographers of
the genus Cypraea, such as Reeve, Sowerby, Roberts, and Hidalgo, erroneously recorded the species from various Indo-Pacific
localities, with the "Philippine Islands" being the favourite locality quoted; Hidalgo even reported it from the "Sandwich
Islands". Most authors treated C. esontropia as a valid species, and the Schilders, in all their papers, restricted the
distribution of the species to Mauritius.
Doubt about the species taxonomic status and distributional range, was raised by Dr. Verdcourt in his monograph on East
African Cowries (Journ. E. Afr. Nat. Hist. Soc., 23(7):282), who suggested that C. esontropia may be no more than a variety
of C. cribraria Linnaeus. A specimen of C. cribraria, with small, pale wine-coloured spots on the labial margin, collected by
Penn at Shanzu, Kenya, was thought to be C. esontropia by Mr. W. Old, Jr. (in Verdcourt).
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casis cornuta
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