Subulate Auger

• Its family, the Terebridae, is related to the cone snails and the turrids, and many of its species hunt with a hollow radular tooth used as a harpoon.
• The shell, with its auger-like profile, is among the easiest to recognise in the Indo-Pacific.
• Its shell is a very tall, narrow cone of more than twenty whorls, with square brown blotches on a cream ground in three rows, which gives it the name auger snail.
• It belongs to the toxoglossans, the same group as the cone snails: it hunts by injecting venom through a hollow, harpoon-shaped radular tooth.
• Unlike the cones, many augers have lost the venom apparatus and swallow their prey whole; the group is very varied in that respect.
• Its prey are polychaete worms and hemichordates, which it locates beneath the sand.
• Its venom, like that of the cones, contains peptides being investigated as painkillers.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - external calcareous shell (mollusc)

Habitat and environment

Shallow sandy bottoms of Indo-Pacific reefs

Sources consulted: Linneo (1767); Taylor y Kantor, revisiones de Terebridae; Puillandre y Holford (2010), Chemistry & Biology; anatomia de Gastropoda