Cowries

Cowries, particularly the tiger cowrie, Cypraea tigris, have always been my favourite seashell. They are neat, compact and most of them are beautifully patterned.

We used to collect tiger cowries in the flat, sandy area off Mombasa's beaches just below the level of low tide. The one on the left of the picture is typical of those that grazed in the areas of sea grass, which were easy to swim over; when we saw one, we duck-dived to pick it up. It was found on a day when a group of us went out to the Two Fishes south of Mombasa.

More exotic tigris shells could be found in different environments. The one on the right was found with Tony Chetham on the coral wave cut platform near what was commonly called 'The Elephant', a wreck off the seafront of Mombasa Island - see Kevin Patience's article on the MEPS website here.

These cowries, one of the many Monetaria annulus subspecies, litter some East African beaches, with wide colour variations in the shells. To the right are two specimens of red coral.

Years later we started to find a very different cowrie on the west coast of Scotland. This is the European or Spotted Cowrie, Trivia monacha. It only occurred on certain beaches and, being less than a centimetre long, was difficult to find. To give a sense of scale, the white bits in the picture are grains of sand.

When we returned to Tanzania in 2012 we found the coast stripped bare of its lager and prettier shells, except in one or two places. In one, cowries were still abundant - we found three different species in a short morning's walk - but we didn't pick them up and keep them. They were spectacularly beautiful. This is the black humped cowrie, Cypraea mauritia. I would never have been able to identify it had I not stumbled upon Shaun Metcalfe's document of his father, Kit's researches into cowries, downloadable at the MEPS website here.

A website which gives some idea of the huge variety of cowries is here.