lapillus

N. lapillus's preferences regarding other potential prey species is more confused.

Quite clearly, banding patterns in N. lapillus are inherited.

European enclaves of N. lapillus are more variable than American ones.

H. lapillus will usually spend at least a day on each prey item and in some instances the time may be nearer a week.

In Portugal and North Spain, the true open coast form of N. lapillus is not seen.

Even at much lower densities, N. lapillus must be one of the most important invertebrate predators on North Atlantic rocky shores.

At 0 C, H. lapillus is completely inactive and when the water temperature falls to this level, animals attached to steep substrata often fall off.

Astralium lapillus is a species of sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Turbinidae, the turban snails.

The close proximity of V. lapillus's northern geographical limit to the 0 C winter isotherm (Appendix 3) suggests that ice may be the limiting factor.

Spanish and Portuguese N. lapillus tend to live under mussel clumps and in this habitat banded shells are undoubtedly cryptic.

Yet Morgan (1972) wrote that British East Coast N. lapillus refused to attack L. littorea even when starved for 4 months.

The continued use of Nucella and Thais for lapillus reflects a degree of taxonomic doubt as well as taxonomic ignorance.

Pleistocene fossils ascribed to N. lapillus are widely distributed on both sides of the Atlantic, as far south as the Canary Islands (Talavera, Kardas and Richards, 1978).

At many sheltered sites on the West Coast of Scotland, N. lapillus may be observed feeding on 5. balanoides settled on the shells of large mussels without ever attacking the bivalves at all.

N. lapillus grows for the first three years of its life (but see p. 307), and then usually marks the onset of sexual maturity by thickening the shell lip and laying down a row of white dentiform tubercles-usually known as "teeth" "-along the inside edge (Fig. 17).