Gastropods · Neogastropoda · Terebridae

Subulate Auger

Terebra subulata

Not Evaluated

It has not yet been assessed against the IUCN criteria. See full glossary

A snail with a very long, pointed shell of more than twenty whorls, patterned with square brown blotches on a cream ground. It lives buried in the sand beside reefs and hunts polychaete worms that it locates beneath the sediment.

Size

8 cm – 15 cm

Diet

Carnivore

Feeds mainly on other animals.

Social structure

Solitary

Lives and hunts alone, joining others only to breed.

Sighting difficulty

Unknown

OceanCarnivore Solitary Ocean Mollusc

61countries

Fun facts

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.