A heavy, blunt conch with three big knobs on the last whorl and a thickened lip flared out and colored orange to pink inside. Up to 17 cm (6.7 in), and the one large shell almost guaranteed on any shallow sand or seagrass patch in this sea.
It is essentially a 🌊 Red Sea and 🌊 Gulf of Aden animal, which makes it one of the few big shells a diver can find here and nowhere else in the 🌊 Indian Ocean. It grazes algae and detritus off the sand, hauling itself along in the lurching conch gait, and spends the hottest part of the day partly buried with the eyes up.
Being common, edible and easy to collect has a cost. Along both coasts this species is gathered for food and for the shell trade, and piles of them turn up beside fishing camps; that is also why the biggest individuals are hard to find near towns. The knobs, incidentally, are not decoration but reinforcement, added at the same stage the lip thickens and growth stops.
- heavy shell with three large blunt knobs on the last whorl
- thick flared lip, orange to pink inside
- stalked eyes and a pointed snout out of the aperture
- shell to 17 cm
