The Pew Environment Group is a founding member of the Chagos Environment Network, a collaboration of nine conservation and scientific organisations seeking to protect the rich biodiversity of the Chagos Islands and its surrounding waters. CEN members are: The Chagos Conservation Trust; The Linnean Society of London; The Marine Conservation Society; The Pew Environment Group; The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; The Royal Society; The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds; The Zoological Society of London; and Professor Charles Sheppard of the University of Warwick (on behalf of many of the visiting scientists). “
“In Greek mythology, Triton was the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite and, although he

is thanked for calming seas and assisting sailors, he was actually quite a coxcomb, preferring to dance and play with the 50 Nereids and making beautiful sounds by blowing into seashells. Triton’s name is given to a group of seashells belonging to the Ranellidae, Palbociclib purchase which are a family of poorly understood marine gastropod predators and amongst which is the pan-tropical ‘triton’s’. Last year

(2011), I was invited LGK-974 molecular weight to participate in a research workshop based in a village, Mosteiros, on the island of São Miguel in the Açores. The Açores workshop was convened at the Casa do Pescador dos Mosteiros (the Mosteiros Fishermen’s Club) and where, on the shelves of the little museum and in the village Café/Restaurant Ilhéu, were 52 shells of the triton Charonia lampas PtdIns(3,4)P2 of various sizes. Actually, I had seen and collected this species in the Açores before, in 1965, as a participant in the undergraduate Chelsea College Açores Expedition, where five individuals of C. lampas were collected from off the village of Urzelinha on São Jorge. These specimens are now lodged in the collections of the Natural History

Museum (NHM), London. For such a predator, the Açores sample of C. lampas is large and a study of them has revealed, amongst other things, that individuals with a shell height of 265 mm probably lived for at least 13 years. In the NHM collections is a specimen from Malta that is 390 mm tall: so how old was that? By any standards this is a big animal. Observations on C. lampas in 1965 and 2011 also demonstrated that in the Açores it is a predator of the starfish Ophidiaster ophidianus. Elsewhere, it also feeds on O. ophidianus and other echinoderms. The largest species of Charonia, and perhaps the most well known, is the Indo-West Pacific Charonia tritonis and which, on the Great Barrier Reef in eastern Australia, eats the crown-of-thorns starfish, Acanthaster planci. In reviewing the crown-of-thorns problem on the reef, it has been suggested that depletion of its natural predator, C. tritonis, by shell collectors might be one factor involved in the starfish outbreaks and thus their destruction of reef corals. Whether this is true or not, C. tritonis is now fully protected on the Great Barrier Reef. And so, ostensibly, is C.