ID's on maybe a welk and a cowrie??

[Jazmine18]

I just found these crawling on my purple leather when i was fraggin git...I was looking at some pics of welks in another thread and this one seems to look like it..And is the little white one a cowrie?? Ive never bought any so i assumme it hitched here on someones zoas i bought recently. any help with id's would be appreciative
thanks in advance..

 

[pagojoe]

I can't tell for sure about the whelk, since it seems like your camera wanted to focus on the background or something else, but I believe it is technically a "whelk." I don't think it's one of the species that will kill all the other snails in your tank. I could tell for sure if you could get clear pics of the aperture and straight down on the dorsum, but I think it's a species of Engina, which may eat tiny snails and worms, but may also eat the little vermetid snails that reefers complain about.

The one that looks like a cowry is an ovulid, and won't eat anything but your soft corals, and maybe only the leather where you found it. I can't tell if the shell has any sculpture on it, but it looks like the species that's usually called Pseudocypraea exquisita, now being lumped under the older name Pseudocypraea adamsonii. It often has the dark spot on the middle of the dorsum, though not all are as dark as the third pic from the top on this page:

http://www.gastropods.com/6/Shell_8596.html

If it's smooth, it's probably in a different genus. From what I can see of your snail, it also looks similar to Pseudosimnia whitworthi, and several others in the genus:

http://www.gastropods.com/8/Shell_5508.html

You might want to look through these pics and see if you see one that is a better match:

http://www.gastropods.com/Taxon_pages/TN_Family_OVULIDAE_OVULINAE_OVULINI.html

Cheers,



Don

 

[Jazmine18]

better pictures of whelk??

better pictures of whelk??

I messed around with the settings on my camera and got it to work pretty nice for me..still not awesome on closeups though they are all blurry but heres the pics..

 

[pagojoe]

Is that the same snail in the upper photos? The other pic made it look more angular. This one looks to be Cantharus tinctus, which is a true buccinid whelk. At least one paper reports that they eat only barnacles in some areas of Florida, although they certainly have the ability to kill other snails and clams, like the others in that genus. I suspect that's what they'd do when they got hungry, since most people don't have a steady supply of barnacles in their tanks.

http://www.gastropods.com/8/Shell_3228.html

Cheers,



Don