This page links to some of the living seashells we saw and photographed during two trips to the Solomon Islands in August 1987 and April 1994. This page includes shelled gastropods and chitons; nudibranchs and their relatives are figured on another page. Both trips were made back in the old days of film cameras, and most of my 36 exposures per dive were saved for nudibranchs and sea slugs, so photos of shells were rather limited. Besides, 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. Our dive trips were of limited duration, and I rarely would 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 did 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. In the genus Cryptoplax, however, the shell plates are reduced and arranged along the dorsum embedded in thick surrounding tissue.
Scaphopods are not gastropods and therefore not really snails, but instead belong to a related molluscan class Scaphopoda. Also called tusk shells, most species have curved, tusk-like shells with openings on both ends. They generally live buried in the sand.
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