Mollusk devours Cucumber

Hi all,

Got this in Lembeh. The shell ate the whole damn Cucumber, great stuff for video. I'm writing a short script and wanna name the attacking shell, trouble is I'm a 'noob' when it comes to Mollusks! Anyone have the common name for this guy?

Cheers,

Mark

How about John?

Thats a pretty common name...

its not as common but M. Creosote seems appropriate

(Edit: sorry if my humour is warped ... its Friday afternoon!)

I knew it, i knew it.

The machine was humming along nicely and along comes some monkey throwing those spanners again!

OK, Mssrs. smarty pants and wise bollox whats the scientific name? no, I don't think its anything like Johnus slipperybutticus.

Anyone else?

Mark.

(Friday here too)!

or Jon

uh, any moderators here?

H E L P !

Make it stooooooooop !

It looks a bit like Tonna perdix but I can't be sure at all. They do prey on sea cucumbers. The common name for that species is partridge tun (according to Gosliner, et al). Perhaps you could just go with tun.

I agree on Tonna but I'm not so sure about the species. I've sent a PM to Pagojoe - Don Barclay - who's a mollusc expert to check it out.

Don't bother asking for help from moderators. They're the ones being snarky (and isn't Veitch your buddy?)

Agreed - Partridge Tun

Thanks for the help.

I appreciate that, especially after the hounding, the ridicule, the harassment, the public flogging experienced at the tongues of those bullies.

Leslie, please, when referring to Mike Veitch, the use of the word 'friend' should be used with caution. After all, he is Canadian!!

Cheers,

Mark.

Tsk tsk. Not all Canadians are sneaky UW terrorists.

One has to wonder why you have been singled out for harassment when everyone else gets nothing but kind words. Exactly what have you done to - or with - them?

hahaha, good humour, love it, but what's a fertile mind like that doing hanging out here with us social degenerates?

They're all just jealous, jealous I tell you. Not just because I secretly welcome the sarcastic humor, oh no, it's worse than that, its because they know I've mastered that really wiggly, fiddly i-a licensing section in Gran Tourismo 3 !! Sheesh, my fingers ache !! (normally a line reserved for deviants such as DeanB)

Cheers,

Mark.

Yup, I believe you guys all nailed it down to the genus. If you'd asked me my guess without looking at the photo, I'd have guessed Tonna perdix, too. Tonna perdix sometimes lacks the feathered markings on parts of the shell, but this usually only occurs in gerontic individuals, and only on maybe a quarter or a third of the last whorl. The markings wouldn't be lacking on as much of the shell as is visible in the pic, so it's not that one. If it came from Lembeh, it's not one of the species restricted to eastern Australia or Hawaii, so it's probably Tonna galea. The species has a worldwide distribution in tropical and subtropical waters, but doesn't seem to be very common anywhere. I've only found one specimen in all my diving and snorkeling. They get comparatively huge, over 300mm. The foot on one that size would be nearly a meter front to back.

Cheers,

Don

OK, so as not tread on anyone's toes or run the risk of giving misleading information (who me?) I'm going to be adjusting the script.

Thanks for all the help, appreciate it immensely.

Regards,

Mark.

P.S Leslie, did you ever use that clip of the Decorator Crab? For future reference if I ever post stuff thats a few seconds long, in mp4 format resized etc feel free to grab it for scientific purposes etc.

Sorry I didn't really answer your question, but you probably Googled it already. The common name is Giant Tun.

Don

Don,

I been googlin' since yesterday! Still, me being a donkey and all I hadn't found what I'd been looking for. All the sites I could find which were helpful had reams and reams of scientific names, not one John amongst them.. I was lost.

Thanks for shedding light in my hour of darkness. For what its worth I'm going to be posting the images of all of the shells, slugs, bugs and crawly critters from the trip sometime in the coming week or two. Check my flickr site (linked below) for those updates.

Thanks again,

Mark.

Thanks for the permission, Mark. Not quite scientific use but I love having these short vids on my laptop to show the locals when I'm doing fieldwork. It's surprising how many of them even on islands don't know much about what's under the ocean besides fish & edible inverts. And they're super useful for lectures & such.