Northern Kauri
| Northern cowrie shell | ||||||||||||
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Housing of Trivia arctica |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Trivia arctica | ||||||||||||
| ( Pulteney , 1799) |
The northern kauri or arctic kauri ( Trivia arctica ) is a small species of snail from the family Triviidae that is found in the northern Atlantic Ocean and eats sea squirts .
features
The Northern Kauri has a lemon-shaped, shiny, uniformly very pale light brown to white casing without any color pattern on the surface. The snail shell is fluted with 20 to 30 transverse fine ridges and has a long and narrow housing mouth. The last passage overgrows and covers all older turns. The shell becomes about 10 mm long and about 8 mm wide in a fully grown snail. The appearance of the species is similar to that of the European cowrie snail ( Trivia monacha ), but it has color patterns.
The body of the snail looks like Trivia monacha , but the male has a blade-like, flattened penis . The mantle is covered with many papillae. In greater water depths the animals are lighter than in the intertidal zone. The foot is light yellow or light orange. The admedian teeth of the radula are covered with teeth.
Life cycle
The snails are separate sexes. The mating season is in autumn, winter and early spring. The male mates with the female with his penis. Veliger larvae hatch from the eggs with a light-colored intestinal canal, the velum of which has four very long lobes and which, after a phase as free-swimming zooplankton , metamorphose into crawling juvenile snails .
distribution
The snail is mainly found in the northern Atlantic Ocean on the Orkney Islands and the coasts of Scotland and Norway , but can also be found southwards to the Mediterranean .
It lives below the intertidal zone, in the north at depths of up to 100 m and in the south to depths of about 1000 m.
Way of life
The Northern Kauri feeds on colony-forming sea squirts , especially Botryllus schlosseri .
literature
- Marie V. Lebour (1933): The British species of Trivia: T. arctica and T. monacha. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 18 (2), pp. 477-484.
- Frank Riedel: Origin and evolution of the "higher" Caenogastropoda . Berliner Geoscientific Abhandlungen, Series E, Volume 32, Berlin 2000, 240 pages, ISBN 3-89582-077-6 .
Web links
- MJ de Kluijver, SS Ingalsuo, RH de Bruyne: Trivia arctica (Pulteney, 1789). Marine Species Identification Portal
- Trivia arctica - Northern cowrie shell. Sea water lexicon
- Naturaleza, flora y fauna Cantábrica (in Spanish)