Tiger Cowrie

• The porcelain gloss of its shell comes from the mantle constantly covering and polishing it; a shell picked up dead and worn never achieves that look.
• Despite the name, its markings are rounded like a leopard's rather than a tiger's stripes.
• Its shell gleams like polished porcelain, and not through wear: the mantle envelops it completely when the animal is active and keeps depositing layers of enamel from the outside.
• That same mantle, extended and covered in papillae, camouflages it as it moves, so that a live cowrie does not look like a shell.
• Its shell has served as money: cowrie shells of the genus were for centuries the currency of large regions of Africa, Asia and Oceania, and circulated in international trade, including the slave trade.
• The narrow, toothed aperture is a defence: it makes it hard for a crab or an octopus to extract the animal.
• The female lays her eggs in a mass that she broods actively, staying on top of it until hatching.
• Collection for the shell trade has reduced its populations on several accessible reefs.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - external calcareous shell (mollusc)

Habitat & environment

Coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific, from 0 to 40 m

Sources consulted: Museo de Historia Natural de Londres; Hogendorn y Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade; Wilson, Australian Marine Shells