European Kauri
| European Kauri | ||||||||||||
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Trivia monacha |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Trivia monacha | ||||||||||||
| da Costa , 1778 |
The European kauri ( Trivia monacha ) is a small species of snail in the family Triviidae that is found in the northern Atlantic Ocean and eats sea squirts .
Appearance
The European Kauri has a semicircular, dirty white to reddish or light brown casing with three dark spots on the surface. The shell is characterized by a fine corrugation of 20 to 30 transversely running fine ridges, in contrast to other families of cowrie snails, whose shell surface is smooth or provided with sculptures and spikes. The last passage overgrows and covers all older turns. The shell is up to 15 mm long and about 8 mm wide in a fully grown snail. The case mouth is long and narrow. The appearance of the species is similar to that of the Arctic Kauri ( Trivia arctica ), which, however, has a pure white housing.
The snail's body looks like Trivia monacha , but the male has a thread-like, cylindrical penis . The dark coat is covered with a few papillae, the tips of which are usually pale yellow, drawn out in a long sipho and covers the whole or almost the whole shell. The foot is orange or light yellow. The admedian teeth of the radula have no teeth.
distribution
The snail lives on hard soils below the intertidal zone in the Mediterranean and Atlantic to the North Sea, and is particularly common in the southern parts of the range.
Life cycle
The snails are separate sexes. The mating season is in late spring and summer. The male mates with the female with his penis. The eggs hatch veliger larvae with a very dark intestinal canal, the velum has two slightly incised flaps and about five to six months after a phase as a free-floating zooplankton to creeping young snails metamorphose .
Way of life
The European cowrie feeds on sea squirts ( Botryllus schlosseri , Botrylloides leachi and Diplosoma listerianum ), which can be eaten with the rasp tongue . The inside of the sea squirt is used by the snails to store the egg capsules, which contain up to 800 eggs.
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 monacha (da Costa, 1778). Marine Species Identification Portal
- Trivia monacha - Ribbed mock cowrie snail, European cowrie snail. Sea water lexicon
- ARKive Images of Life on Earth
- BioImages: The Virtual Field Guide (UK)
- Naturaleza, flora y fauna Cantábrica (in Spanish)