There was a time in the early 1960s when, if I wanted to collect cowries, I could walk down from our house, cross the golf course and Azania Drive, and climb down the cliff to the reef which ran the length of Mombasa's sea frontage - the waves breaking on it are visible in the picture just beyond the line of palm trees. Even local cowrie experts like Kit Metcalf acknowledged that, in those days, it was one of the best places to collect these beautiful shells.
These days I don't have to go out to collect my cowries, they come to me, not in a cardboard box in a delivery van but via the local charity shop, where they occasionally turn up. It's a tribute to the attraction of the cowrie that so many people have them. It also adds a new dimension to their interest: I wonder where they were found, who found them, and the story of their travels since they were picked up off a tropical sea floor.
This, the latest addition, is the snake's-head or serpent's-head cowrie, Cypraea (or Monetaria) caputserpentis. It's an abundant cowrie across most of the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans from Hawaii and the Cocos Islands to East Africa and, as one would expect with such a widely-distributed species, there is considerable variation in colour, pattern and size between local populations.
It's found in intertidal and shallow subtidal environments, under rocks and in crevices, or sometimes exposed. Kit Metcalf found it on the East African coast but wrote that it was most abundant in the Seychelles.
As with all of these beautiful shells, they have suffered terribly from collectors but caputserpentis remains abundant - witness its price on the internet, US$5.55 for a box of ten shells, or about 50p each.
No comments:
Post a Comment