Coral snails
| Coral snails | ||||||||||||
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Enclosure of Coralliophila fearnleyi |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Coralliophilidae | ||||||||||||
| Chenu , 1858 |
The coral snails (Coralliophilinae, originally Coralliophilidae, synonym Magilidae) are a subfamily within the family of the porcupine snails (Muricidae), which are distributed in the warm seas of all three great oceans and suck on cnidarians as ectoparasites .
features
The exclusively marine coral snails have white, mostly small and thick-walled shells that are up to 10 cm in size in some species and whose shape and size differ greatly depending on the species. The usually slightly pink case mouth ends in a siphon channel.
The coral snails are separate sexes. The male mates with the female with his penis . The female keeps her egg capsules in the mantle cavity, where free-swimming Veliger larvae hatch. After a phase they sink to the ground as free-swimming plankton eater and metamorphose into small crawling snails.
The coral snails have no radula and are specialized in sucking in body juices or soft tissue from flower animals as ectoparasites with their long, widely stretchable proboscis that are drilled into the host animal . Their host animals include soft corals , sea anemones and sea fans .
distribution
The coral snails live on corals in all seas where these host animals occur. They occur on the mid-Atlantic ridge , the Canary Islands , the deep-water corals of the Mediterranean , from the Florida Keys to the coast of Brazil , in the Indo-Pacific , the southwestern Pacific Ocean and the Australian Islands in the South Pacific. The plankton-eating Veliger larvae spread by the ocean currents enable this distribution.
Systematics
The coral snails were originally described as a separate family, but according to the current system, they are considered a subfamily of the spiny snails (Muricidae).
Genera
The following 11 genera belong to the subfamily Coralliophilinae:
- Babelomurex Coen, 1922
- Coralliophila H. Adams & A. Adams, 1853
- Emozamia Iredale, 1929
- Hirtomurex Coen, 1922
- Latiaxis Swainson, 1840
- Leptoconchus Rüppell, 1835
- Liniaxis Laseron, 1955
- Magilus Montfort, 1810
- Mipus de Gregorio, 1885
- Rapa Röding, 1798
- Rhizochilus Steenstrup, 1850
literature
- John Wesley Tunnell: Encyclopedia of Texas Seashells: Identification, Ecology, Distribution, and History. Texas A&M University Press, College Station (Texas) 2010. pp. 207f.
- R. Tucker Abbott, Percy A. Morris: A Field Guide to Shells: Atlantic and Gulf Coasts and the West Indies. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston 2001, p. 213.
- Marco Oliverio, Serge Gofas (2006): Coralliophiline diversity at mid-Atlantic seamounts (Neogastropoda, Muricidae, Coralliophilinae). Bulletin of Marine Science 79 (1), pp. 205-230 (26).
Web links
- Family Coralliophilidae - Coral snails - Fischhaus Zepkow
- Coral snails . In: Lexicon of Biology , online edition, 1999.