This page links to some of the living seashells we saw and photographed during a trip to Lembeh Strait in December, 2013. This page includes shelled gastropods and chitons; nudibranchs and their relatives are figured on another page. Getting living animal photos of shells usually requires patience. Disturbed animals tend to retract into their shells and often will not come out for some time. Generally our dive trips to Indonesia are of limited duration, and we will not spend the time to wait for a shell's animal to show itself, so the photos below represent only a small fraction of the species we actually see there. Shells were neither collected nor measured in the field, so any sizes given are just estimates.
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Chitons are not gastropods and therefore not really snails, but instead belong to a related molluscan class Polyplacophora. Their most visible external character is a shell composed of eight usually overlapping plates down the length of the dorsum.
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