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Components of mother peral mop
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.
"There seems to be a strong superstition, Sheriff Kiego told me, that it was a quite common belief among the Trukese people
that when a Trukese dies, his spirit enters a Golden Cowry and for that reason, very few are taken. The student at Yap
promised me he would get me a pair of good Golden Cowries if he could persuade the head chief to let him send them to me, but
I have not received the shells."
Walter O. Cernohorsky, previously quoted in this story, writes with information concerning the salinity of the water
preferred by the Golden Cowry. Our article had insisted that the shell prefers maximum salinity. On this subject, he writes
as follows:
"Normally, I find that Cypraea stay away from areas where fresh water enters the sea. However, this is not so in the case of
C. aurantium and a few other species of the Nadroga reef. Quite a large river, the Sigatoka river is discharging water into
the sea near the town of Sigatoka, which is on the Nadroga reef. I had 12 C. aurantium which were collected only 1 mile from
the delta of the river. About 5 miles in a SE direction is another small river discharging into the sea. In the same
locality, on the reef I saw 3 C. aurantium collected. At the extreme end of the Nadroga reef is another larger river, the
Navua, discharging into the sea."
With no thought of entering into a controversy and guided only by a desire to learn the truth of the matter, we suppose a
definite answer will not be obtained until samples of the water in which the Golden Cowry have been found are sent in sterile
bottles to the University of Philippines for a chemical analysis of their contents. We submit, however, that with mammoth
breakers pouring in from the boundless sea with such force that the shell cannot "hold on" as Mr. Cernohorsky says, the water
would not be contaminated to any great extent by the fresh water from a river a mile away. Looks like a great project for
some young marine biologist.
It will probably come as a surprise to many shell collectors that the Golden Cowry has found a place in the novels of the
South Seas. This fact was called to our attention by Stanley Levine of Long Island who writes:
"In one of Jack London's South Sea Tales entitled 'Yah! Yah! Yah!', is the following passage:
'One day, I happened to speak of my disappointment in failing to trade for a beautiful pair of orange cowries. The pair was
worth five pounds in Sydney if it was worth a cent. I had offered two hundred sticks of tobacco to the owner, who had held
out for three hundred.'
"Mr. London placed the locality of this story at Oolong Atoll, four degrees south latitude, and two hundred and fifty miles
from the nearest land, probably in Melanesia, but populated by Polynesians."
That's all for now. We hope this research will be continued by others and that future information may be published in the
Sean Raynon Sabado especially in non-scientific form and for it's news value only. If you must be scientific about it, try
The Veliger or The Nautilus but send the Shell News a reprint.
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