Nature Walk: Cone Snails

In this episode, we look at the beautiful cone snail, an extremely poisonous little mollusk that is slow but efficient.

Additional voiceover provided by Elisea.

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Cone snails seem to always be on vacation, because they love warm, tropical waters, like those of coral reefs. They range mostly in coastal waters of the Eastern Pacific, from the Gulf of California south to Peru, but some can also be found in waters around the Galapagos Islands, the Cape coast of South Africa, and the Mediterranean, among other places. In these beautiful underwater settings, with all their vibrant colors and exotic sea life, something deadly is lurking in the sand, and that is the cone snail itself. Over 800 species (or kinds) are said to have been found around the world, and they all hunt different prey. Some are known to eat other snails, some prefer worms, and some dine on fish.

Cone snails are faceless little creatures who live in beautiful shells that, in some coastal communities, have been traded like money, or worn as jewelry. These unique mollusks have also inspired art.

Mollusk
A mollusk is a soft, invertebrate—or animal with no backbone—that usually lives in a shell.

While cone snails are not known to be aggressive, they will sting someone who picks them up to look at their lovely shell. They may be extremely slow—they are snails after all—and nearly blind, since they hunt at night, but cone snails are very efficient hunters who can easily catch prey that are much faster than they are. First, they’re so good at what they do because Yah has given them a great sense of smell. A top sniffing tube, known as a siphon, is used to draw in smells from the water around it. If prey is detected, like a fish for instance, the cone snail will then stick out its long proboscis, which is like their tongue. At the tip of the tongue is a barbed tooth that is considered a harpoon, because the cone snail strikes the fish with it to inject a deadly mixture of venom.

The toxins in the venom will paralyze the fish, or cause it to not be able to move. Everything inside the fish will shut down and stop functioning, so it won’t be able to swim away. The cone snail will then pull in its proboscis and open its mouth, or rostrum really wide to swallow the fish or other prey whole, and the fish will slowly be digested. Since the tooth, or harpoon gets stuck in the fish or prey, the cone snail loses it, but it usually has about twenty more or so growing at any given time, therefore a new harpoon tooth will always be ready for use when the next meal swims by. Whatever the cone snail cannot digest will be regurgitated or vomited up, such as scales, a fish’s spine, and that little harpoon tooth it used to poison the fish.

The venom of cone snails is basically a mixture of peptides, which are small proteins. Cone snails can produce hundreds of different kinds to target and block specific functions in their prey. These very peptides are of great interest to scientists, because they can also be used to target specific functions in humans. So, these scientists are using Yah’s creatures to invent new drugs full of poison to fight certain diseases and block people from feeling pain these diseases cause. But cone snails aren’t the only creatures scientists are turning to for poisons they use on people. The venom of larger cone snails is potent enough to kill humans if they are injected with enough of it, so it is wise to stay away from these deadly little creatures if you ever come across them in the tropical water they call home.

And remember, this video barely scratches the surface on all the info available on this subject. To learn more, be sure to visit your local library, or ask a grownup for help doing more research on the internet. Shalom.

Keywords: cone snail, cone shell, mollusk, invertebrate, coral reef, peptide, rostrum, syphon, proboscis, nature walk, nature, education, carrots, hebrew israelite, kingdom preppers, growing up hebrew, Little Kingdom Preppers, LKP, Little KP, GUH, KP