FAMILY: currently (March 2015) contains over 800 CONIDAE recognized species. Cone snails are typically found in warm and tropical seas and oceans worldwide, and they reach (Cone shells) their greatest diversity in the Western Indo-Pacific region.

Cone snails , cone Venom : The venom consists of a shells, or cones are mixture of peptides, called common names for a conopeptides . It is estimated large group of small that more than 50,000 to large-sized conopeptides can be found, because every species of cone extremely snail is thought to produce its venomous predatory own specific venom. sea snails , marine gastropod molluscs. Danger for humans: There are approximately 30 records of Behaviour: Normally, humans killed by cone snails. by the day they hide Human victims suffer little pain, in the sand; at night because the venom contains an analgesic component. Some they emerge and species reportedly can kill a feed-mainly on human in under five minutes , marine worms. 2 thus the name "cigarette snail" as supposedly one only has time to smoke a cigarette before Attack mechanism: The 1 dying. tooth (1) is hollow and 4 barbed, and is attached , a pain reliever to the tip of the radula 1,000 times as powerful as in the radular sac (2) , morphine, was initially inside the snail's throat. 3 isolated from the venom of When the snail detects the magician , a prey nearby, it magus . It was extends a long flexible approved by the U.S. Food tube called a proboscis 1 (3) towards the prey. and Drug Administration in The radula tooth is December 2004 under the loaded with venom name "Prialt". Other drugs from the venom bulb (4) are in clinical and preclinical and, still attached to the trials, such as compounds of radula, is fired from the the toxin that may be used in proboscis into the prey the treatment of Alzheimer's by a powerful muscular disease, Parkinson's disease, contraction. depression and epilepsy.

Done by Alba Avila Grimaldos with information extract from Abbott, R. T. (2001). Seashells of the World . Macmillan.

Figure 1 from: Olivera, B. (2002). "Conus" Venom Peptides: Reflections from the Biology of Clades and Species. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 33, 25-47.