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Natural body jewelry
Natural body jewelry Shell collecting has also evolved to a high state. We can only be thankful that groups such as our Honored Society have successfully undertaken the task of stimulating and perpetuating an interest and understanding of shells and shell lore
This reef, if anything, presented an even more uninspiring spectacle than the one I had worked the previous day. Silty water lapped at slabs of black rock and colorless corals covered with a slimy scum. It was not the most enjoyable form of shelling by any means. The corals were sharp, and being only half exposed one had to lift them out of the water and balance them on one's knee in order to examine the underside. Cuts and scratches were unavoidable. An hour of backbreaking toil produced only a few live shells, among them C. errones, C. arabica arabica, lamarcki redimita, and one or two large C. vitellus. Suddenly, one of the fisherwomen who was searching nearby for mussels and rock shells for the evening's cooking pot, called to me. Stumbling about in ankle deep, muddy water I groped my way over to her to see what she wanted. [ photo - uncredited; published
inverted, corrected here; cropped.]
Specimen of Cypraea nivosa
54mm x 32mm x 26mm found
in a box containing C. zebra
(Linn), purchased by Mrs.
Kinloch from the late Mr. A. E.
Salisbury collection. Label is
the original but does not have
locality data.
Under a typically half-dead piece of coral she had turned over was a solitary Cypraea nivosa.
There it sat, the greyish, mottled mantle slowly retracting to expose the soft golden brown tints of the glossy dorsum peppered with off-white, smoky spots, some faintly tinged with olive hues, contrasting, yet in some inexplicable way subtly blending with the drab browns and greys of the coral. The irregular mantle line was not very prominent on this particular specimen and at first I thought it might be a freak C. vitellus. But the conspicuously raised ridges faintly tinged with purple around the anterior and posterior apertures dispelled any doubts.
Carefully, I eased the shell from its foothold and placed it in my shell bag. A reward for the finder? Of course, and well deserved. She acknowledged it with a toothless grin and resumed to her the much more important task of filling her basket with succulent mussels. It was at the same time the signal for a massive onslaught upon the reef by the villagers. Needless to say, no other C. nivosa was found there, although I was assured by our host that one had been found some months ago on the same reef.
Back in the sultry confines of our small room, I placed the C. nivosa in a specimen jar half-full of sea water and waited for it to adjust to the strange new environment. It was a long wait almost an hour. Finally, black tentacles probing the 'nothingness' and within another half-hour the shell was crawling quite confidently across the base of an upturned plate.
Within two days both specimens were en route to the British Museum of Natural History where the back room experts would doubtless soon be sharpening their scalpels and tweezers to conduct a comparative post mortem upon them.
Conclusions reached as the result of the rather superficial examination I was able to make are shown in the table below, left.
Natural body jewelry While I was chatting with Tony Kalnins the other day, the subject of conversation drifted around to that of sea shell coloration. Since Tony is a dealer in shells and I'm a collector of Cypraeidae, the topic wasn't unusual – but the consequences of this discussion proved to be unusually enlightening and somewhat amusing.
My companion and I were discussing "golden" variants of sea shells, Zoila friendii in particular. After agreeing that some golden shells were not unlike some sun-bleached specimens, Tony half-jokingly suggested baking a C. friendii. We decided to try it. He supplied a couple of chipped specimens which I was to bake in my electric oven.
A few days later I got around to the project. I selected the darker of the two C. friendii for the oven, thinking that the second specimen would serve as a reference (I expected a relatively minor color change). The selected shell had a black-brown base, this color extending up above the margins. The dorsum had the usual irregularly placed dark brown blotches on a bluish background. I used a small thermostatically controlled oven, placing the shell upon a piece of asbestos board. I warmed the shell slowly, taking about one hour to reach 400 F. After one half hour at this temperature, I thought I could see a lightening of the color around the margins. After one hour at 400 F, I again looked through the glass of the oven door. The black-brown just above the margins was definitely turning orange. And so it went. . . .
After six hours at the same temperature, I started reducing the heat. Forty-five minutes later I opened the oven door for the first time since placing the shell within. I removed the warm sea shell. That color! A lovely peach-orange around the margins and base - no sign that the shell had ever been predominantly brown. The fossula remained white and much the same as that of the unbaked specimen. The dorsal blotches, which had been lighter than the basal color, were now a slightly darker shade of orange than the base. The blue ground color had changed to a cream. The overall effect was that of pastel orange hues, with the markings of a typical C. friendii still readily visible. Two or three hairline cracks or stress marks were noted under low magnification -probably from too rapid a thermal change. As with most C. friendii, the shape of this shell was far more irregular than most other sea shells, and this could cause uneven stresses in expansion and contraction – and the tiny cracks. I have seen once-frozen sea shells with far more noticeable stress marks.
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