www.cowries.info

[Patrick]

I have been going through my Umbilia, and comparing them with the literature. In the process I read the article by Lorenz and Massiglia in Visaya with the naming of Umbilia oriettae, and fell over their remark “The numbers of teeth reveal that the shells of oriettae have more teeth labrally than on the columellar side. The opposite is the case in specimens of hesitata and h. beddomei, as well as the northern capricornica and petilirostris, in all of which there are more teeth on the columellar side than on the labral side”.

This didn’t seem right to me, so in the interest of science and at no small risk of ridicule from my wife, I have spent the evening counting teeth on 28 hesitata, 3 oriettae and 21 capricornica/petilirostris. With the exception of a single hesitata, all of the shells have more labral than collumellar teeth. My single fossil eximia also has more labral teeth.

Incidentally it looks to me as if there is an error in table 22 in Wilson and Clarkson’s book on Australian cowries. The entries for “outer lip teeth” and “columellar lip teeth” for the shells from Swains Reefs seem to have been transposed, which then makes sense of a sentence on the previous page. With this correction Wilson and Clarkson also count more labral than columellar teeth in all populations of hesitata/capricornica.

After my evening’s counting of around 3000 teeth, I will leave armeniaca to some other Umbilia freak!

Patrick