Diver survives close encounter with sea souvenir: “Cone snails are very venomous and dangerous to humans”

One tourist’s trip to Egypt nearly ended in tragedy after he encountered a brightly-coloured seashell with a potentially deadly secret.

The traveller, identified simply as ‘Frank’, was snorkelling in Egypt’s Red Sea when he came across the shell and recorded himself picking up the object on his GoPro. He considered taking it home as a souvenir but decided against it, fortunately for him.

A couple of months later he saw a picture of a similar shell online and was shocked to discover that he had held in his hands a cone snail, one of the world’s most poisonous animals.

“Cone snails are very venomous and dangerous to humans,” Dr Nyssa Silbiger of the Uehiro Center for the Advancement of Oceanography told Newsweek. “They should be left alone, but so should all wildlife.”

Why is the cone snail so dangerous?

Cone snails are a family of highly venomous sea snails found in warm seas and oceans around the world. They have also adapted to cooler conditions in the Mediterranean and even areas around southern California.

The snails are highly venomous and capable of stinging using a modified radula tooth, shaped like a dart to thrust out from the head and barb its victims. It uses this mechanism to hunt and paralyse worms and fish to eat but they also pose a major threat to humans, who can be attracted by the brightly coloured, pattern shell. In the case of the larger cone snails, their harpoons can penetrate through gloves and wetsuits.

“I decided to post it on Reddit to find out exactly which cone snail it is and how dangerous it really is,” Frank explained. “The comments seem to have reached the exact species, however, there are a lot of opinions about the real danger.”

All of the roughly 600-700 species of cone snails are venomous but it’s not actually clear whether the specimen recorded by Frank’s GoPro actually posed a threat. The picture shared online doesn’t make clear whether the shell had a live snail inside, or if it was simply an empty shell. Either way, experts were all in agreement that picking up any objects while snorkelling is a foolhardy, and potentially deadly, mistake to make.

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