Bleeding Tooth

• It owes its common name to the two reddish-orange patches around the white teeth of the aperture, which recall a bleeding tooth.
• It is called the bleeding tooth for the orange-red blotch surrounding the two white teeth on the inner lip of the aperture, an unmistakable feature.
• It lives in the splash zone, the highest and most exposed band of rock, where it is out of the water most of the time and only reached by spray.
• It seals the aperture with its calcareous operculum so as not to dry out during the hours of exposure to the sun.
• Its thick shell and strong grip are adaptations to constant wave action.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - external calcareous shell (mollusc)

Habitat and environment

Rocks of the splash zone and upper intertidal of the Caribbean

Sources consulted: Linneo (1758); Smithsonian Marine Station; Warmke y Abbott, Caribbean Seashells; ScienceDirect (Hughes 1989); Science Advances, How colonial animals evolve; Wikipedia, Zooid; anatomia de Gastropoda