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Cone Snail — printable fact sheet
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Animal Fact Sheet
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Cone Snail
Conus
Cone snails are slow-moving marine snails that have converted a tooth into a harpoon. A single radular tooth is hollowed into a barbed dart, loaded into the proboscis, charged with venom and fired hydraulically into prey — the strike is over in milliseconds and the snail simply …
Did you know?
- A single sting from some cone snail species can be fatal to humans, and there is currently no antivenom.
- A cone snail's harpoon is disposable — it is discarded after firing and a fresh tooth is loaded from a magazine held in the radular sac. Ziconotide is roughly a thousand times more potent than morphine by weight and does not cause addiction or tolerance, though it has to be infused into the spinal fluid. Fish-hunting cones can pull down and swallow a fish longer than their own shell by distending the proboscis and stomach. There are around 900 cone species and each carries a distinct venom library, meaning tens of thousands of unstudied bioactive peptides are sitting in shallow tropical water.
What I learned
Draw the cone snail
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