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Marbled Cone Snail — printable fact sheet
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Marbled Cone Snail
Conus marmoreus
The cone snail is a predatory sea snail that hunts fish, and it kills with a harpoon. A modified tooth, hollow and barbed, is loaded from an internal quiver, driven down the extended proboscis and fired into the prey with venom already flowing through it. What comes next is chem…
Did you know?
- The Marbled Cone Snail can deliver one of the fastest strikes in the animal kingdom, using its harpoon-like radula tooth to inject venom in under a second.
- It kills fish by firing a hollow, barbed, harpoon-like tooth loaded with venom. Its venom is a cocktail of hundreds of peptides, some timed to fire in sequence — a fast paralysis first, then a deeper shutdown. Some cone snails release insulin into the water to crash a fish's blood sugar before harpooning it. One of its toxins became a painkiller far more powerful than morphine, and non-addictive.
What I learned
Draw the marbled cone snail
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