Conus - Life Habits

Life Habits

Cone snails are carnivorous, and predatory. They hunt and eat prey such as marine worms, small fish, mollusks, and even other cone snails. Because cone snails are slow-moving, they use a venomous harpoon (called a toxoglossan radula) to capture faster-moving prey such as fish. The venom of a few larger species, especially the piscivorous ones, is powerful enough to kill a human being.

The osphradium (a chemoreceptory organ) in the family Conidae is more highly specialized than the same organ in any other family of gastropods. It is through this sensory modality that cone snails become aware of the presence of a prey animal, not through vision. The cone snails immobilize their prey using a modified, dartlike, barbed radular tooth, made of chitin, along with a poison gland containing neurotoxins. Small species of these cone snails hunt small prey such as marine worms, whereas larger cone snails hunt live fish.

Molecular phylogeny research by Kraus et al. (2010) based on a part of "intron 9" of the gamma-glutamyl carboxylase gene has shown that feeding on fish in Conus has evolved at least twice independently.