How to eat shellfish? Does it have teeth?

A centipede doesn't have a hundred legs, a millipede doesn't have a thousand legs, and how many hands does the rose snail have? It doesn't even have one hand!

According to records, the rose chicoreus palmarosae is widely distributed, from Madagascar, Maldives, Mozambique, and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean to Australia, Indonesia, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and the South my country Sea (Xisha) in the western Pacific. But when I opened the thick "List of Chinese Marine Life", I couldn't find the name of the rose chicoreus palmarosae at all. Why is that?

In fact, the name of the Rose Chicoreus is the name used in Taiwan, my country. The Chinese name of the Chicoreus genus in the "List of Marine Life in China" is the Rose Chicoreus genus, which is the Rose Chicoreus.

Protection from the Thousand Hands

The light brown shell of the Rose Thousand Hands Snail is spindle-shaped and very hard, with deep sutures on the shell surface and high spiral towers. It has dark brown thin spiral ribs and three longitudinal ribs, which are covered with short pink spines. The ends of the spines are forked like a pair of small hands like deer antlers, hence the name Thousand Hands Snail. Although it is easy to associate it with the "Thousand-Handed Guanyin", in fact, the two are not related.

The little hands look "soft and tender". Image: Bricktop / Wikipedia

The appearance of rose snails from different regions is significantly different. For example, the rose snails from the Philippines have short spines on their shells, with a low degree of bifurcation, obvious dark brown stripes on the shell surface, and the embryo shell near the top of the shell is light red.

The color of the Sri Lankan snails is generally lighter than that of the Philippines, and the spines are also significantly different. The spines are very long and forked in proportion to the shell. The rose snails from some places in South Africa have longer spines and a very light shell, usually light pink, with thin and light stripes.

The gorgeous thorns on the rose snail are not just for show. After all, it does not rely on its appearance to make a living. The rose snail's "thousand-hand"-like thorns are just to embarrass predators: no one would want to swallow this hard shell covered with thorns in one bite, and it looks unpalatable.

This is a common self-defense trick used by many members of the family Murex, to which the rose snail belongs. Representatives of the Murex family include the witch murex (Murex troscheli) and the Venus murex (Murex pecten), which are well known to shellfish collectors. They have long, slender protrusions like fish bones on their bodies, which is why they are called murex.

Of course, not all members of the Murexidae family are so easy to identify. Their main feature is that their shells are irregular, angular and have various protrusions. Rapana venosa, one of the most popular large conchs on the Internet, is a member of the Murexidae family.

The shells that compete with us for food

As one of the representatives of carnivorous gastropods, except for a few species that feed on scavengers, most members of the Murexidae family are absolute shell killers, feeding on other shells. Oysters, mussels and other bivalves that like to attach to reefs are easy prey for Murex. They will stick their mouths tightly to the shells of shellfish, and then rely on the acidic substances they secrete to corrode the hard shells.

This alone is not enough. "Good teeth mean a good appetite, and everything you eat tastes delicious and you stay healthy!" The radula sac of the Rose Snail, which looks like a soft ball, is full of radula, which is a very important feeding structure of mollusks. The radula of many carnivorous shellfish, including the Rose Snail, is a standard pointed tongue type, mainly composed of middle teeth and side teeth, and lacks marginal teeth. After all, they no longer need to rely on scraping algae for a living.

Generally speaking, bivalves living in mud and sand are more likely to be attacked by snails that also like to live in mud and sand environments. Most members of the Muricidae family prefer to live in rocky reef environments, so those bivalves that live on fixed bodies are the main food source for members of the Muricidae family.

When these seemingly slow-moving, harmless predatory snails explode in numbers, they may also have an impact on the ecological environment or economic production. According to literature records, an outbreak of the oyster-eating lychee snail (Indothais gradata) in July 1956 along the coast of Guangdong caused the loss of all oyster seedlings planted that year. The rose snail, which is mainly distributed in the South my country Sea and the southern East China Sea, can also prey on large bivalves such as giant clams living on coral reefs. Small shells also have great wisdom

Although there is no research on the predation behavior of the rose snail, we can still use the research on the predation behavior of other murex to imagine how these carnivorous underwater killers wait for opportunities to prey on those bivalves that have no ability to fight back.

We know that the same shell can be thin or thick, and in order to save time, the murex will tend to drill holes or polish the most vulnerable parts of the shell.

The results of a study on the predation of Hexaplex trunculus on blue mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis) showed that small Hexaplex trunculus (shell height 40mm) tended to make holes in the edge of the blue mussel shells, medium Hexaplex trunculus (shell height 55mm) made almost half of the holes and half of the holes were polished, but both were done at the edge of the shells, and only large Hexaplex trunculus (shell height 70mm) would directly make holes in the side of the shells of blue mussels with a shell length of 35mm and a maximum of 65mm to feed.

I don’t know if you have imagined the scene of the rose snail hunting in your mind, but at least we don’t have to worry about the rose snail snail snatching oysters and mussels from us. After all, their population density is far from being able to endanger shellfish farming.