Cowries and Cone Shells

     The high surf finally abated yesterday, leaving White Sands Beach a rocky enterprise.   Disappearing Sands, Magic Sands...Call them what you will, they are gone for the remainder of the winter.   With the surf down, it may be safer to swim if you can handle the rocky entrance and exit.

An Offering to a Mother

  For a variety of reasons, sloth being near the top of the list, we didn't go swimming yesterday.  But we did squeeze in a picnic at Pahoehoe Beach Park, right around the point from the disappearing sands.  It was lovely in the early afternoon, blue sky, cool breezes and a shady spot to share our lunch right by the sea.

    After dining, I left Sandra to work on her novel, the latest installment from Michael Connelly which we were both trying to finish in the week allotted a Hot Pick by the Hawaii State Library.  I walked to the north end of the park where there is a well perforated patch of lava, serving up a convoluted maze of tide pools.  It was in that spot many years ago where I saw arguably my best marine invertebrate, a Juliana's Sea Hare.  This was in the days before cell phone cameras and regrettably I did not get a picture.

Money Cowry 2017 Pahoehoe Beach Park

    Such was not the case yesterday.  Although I did not see a sea hare, I did see two noteworthy things.
 
    The first fell into the Margret Meade category; two women of a certain age were arranging a variety of vegetables on the rocks.  There were little bitty carrots,green beans, yellow peppers...it was quite colorful.  I asked if they were cooking the vegetables on the hot, salty rock and they replied that it was a ceremony in honor of a dead mother whose ashes had been scattered there.

   Très Hawaiian, no?  It got me to thinking about where I want my ashes deposited.   If I'm hoping for someplace with really good tropical fish watching,  perhaps I should head for the Great Reef in the Sky before all the coral is gone...which is to say, sooner rather than later.

    Having narrowly avoided putting my foot in the metaphysical soup, I carefully negotiated the bumpy lava reef, making my decrepit way to the north edge.  There, in the penultimate tidepool, was a money cowry. 

The Tarkus Posing as a Hunting Coneshell Snail

My records suggest that it has been more than two years since I have sighted that small, white and curiously molded cowry with the delicate gray and ecru saddle.  As you will see, there is a special place in my heart for this particular invertebrate.  Being careful not to fall into the tide pool, I took a picture from about ten feet away

The Money Cowry at Her Daytime Leisure

with my Galaxy S4, the results of which you see here.  Its not a fantastic picture, but on the other had I escaped the reef with dry feet and no new scars..Quite an accomplishment, if I do say so myself.  

   At any rate, we are perfectly justified in adding the money cowry to the 2017 list.

    My interest in the money cowry dates back 11 years.  At that time, Sandra and I were living in a tiny condo at Alii Villas 6 months of the year.  The proximity to the ocean allowed us to keep a ten gallon

The Money Cowry Prepares for her Nighttime Display

aquarium.  Every couple of days I would schlep two gallons of fresh ocean water up from the beach and then up two flights of stairs and on out to the aquarium on the lanai.  We mostly used the aquarium for keeping hermit crabs and at times we had as many as seven species.  We gave the most notable hermits names, like the Sheriff and the Mikado, and we fed them tiny bits of meat from a wooden skewer.  

   In addition to keeping the hermit crabs, we would at times capture molluscs and watch them in the aquarium for a day.  What looks like an ordinary shell during the day can evolve into a pretty amazing animal when the sun goes down.  In this manner, we saw at least two species of cone shells hunt, sliding around the tank on their amazingly large foot and extending a siphon from the leading edge.  These guys reminded me of the Tarkus; you could almost hear Emerson, Lake and Palmer playing in the background.  As you will no doubt recall, the Tarkus was dangerous and we were quite aware that concealed just beneath the siphon was a tiny poisonous spear.   Regrettably, we never had the opportunity to watch one of these cone shells make a kill.

   In addition to the cones, we collected a couple cowries.  As you undoubtedly know, cowries maintain their pristine, luminescent shell by extending a mantle at night that covers and cleans the shell.  In some cases, as we proved in the aquarium, this is a rather mundane coat.  In the case of the money cowry, however,  it is like the Fourth of July

The Amazing Fimbriated Mantle

and Disneyland rolled into one.  The mantle is white with an explosion of beautiful fimbria extending to cover  the entire animal.  

    Lucky for us, this was also the time when we purchased our first digital camera.  We took that camera to Sicily.  Thus, Sandra and I can call up pictures from that trip, amazing Greek ruins and the unsettling neighborhoods of Palermo, and marvel at how young we look.   

    Among the first digital pictures we took were those you see here of the money cowry extending her mantle after dark.   You will note that the accompanying photographs were taken out of the water.  Shooting through the aquarium glass at night was unsatisfactory.   Fortunately we were able trick the molluscs into pursuing their nightly behaviors out of the aquarium.

 Professor Demaintenon Out Collecting

    This was also the time when I began to realize how much there was to know about the invertebrates that live in the sea.  With this need in mind, I scouted the internet, evaluating the faculty at UH Hilo for a likely professor of invertebrate zoology.  In this way , I stumbled upon Marta Demaintenon, who was teaching invertebrate zoology to undergraduates in 2006.  There was a picture of Marta in the on line directory.  Suffice it to say, that at least in that picture, she was rather dishy.  One could only imagine a Howard Wallowitz type taking invertebrate zoology based solely on that photograph. 

     My first questions to Marta involved the identification of juvenile hermit crabs.  She was pretty helpful, but let it slip that her main interest was molluscs. In my next email, I attached the pictures of the money cowry in all her glory.  It is my humble opinion that a bouquet of roses would not have had a greater effect.  Marta thanked me for the pictures and has been a great help over the years.

   Returning to the park, I made it back to Sandra who was still engrossed with Michael Connelly.  We waited for a while, hoping for a whale, the absence of which in 2017 has everyone concerned.   I nabbed a picture of a sailboat that had wandered close to shore and we headed back up the hill

to Casa Ono.

jeff 

A Hebrew Cone Imitating the Tarkus