Range: Mozambique and Madagascar.

Description: Moderately small to medium-sized, moderately light to moderately solid. Last whorl conical or ventricosely conical; outline convex at adapical third, less so or straight below; left side often slightly concave above base. Shoulder subangulate. Spire of moderate height, outline concave. Larval shell of 2-2.25 whorls, maximum diameter 0.8-1 mm. Teleoconch sutural ramps flat, with 2 increasing to 4-5 spiral grooves. Last whorl with rather widely spaced punctate spiral grooves from base to centre or slightly beyond; grooves wider and interstitial ribbons grading to ribs at anterior end.

Ground colour white to bluish grey. Last whorl with few to numerous spiral rows of brown to reddish-brown dots; sometimes with wavy axial lines forming an irregular network, often concentrated on each side of centre and also below shoulder. Axial lines may concentrate in solid or interrupted spiral bands. Larval whorls white to brown. Postnuclear sutural ramps with brown to reddish brown radial lines, streaks and blotches, extending over outer margins. Aperture violet behind translucent marginal zone, paler bluish violet deep within.

Periostracum grey, thin, translucent, and smooth.

Habitat and Habits: Intertidal to 20 m or more; in sheltered bays on soft substratum (Grosch, pers. comm., 1989).

Discussion: C. iodostoma resembles C. inscriptus, C. neptunus, and light-coloured C. lienardi. The latter two species can be distinguished by their narrower last whorls (RD < 0.55), tuberculate early postnuclear whorls and angulate shoulders; C. neptunus, moreover, is a distinctly larger species. For the distinction from C. inscriptus, see the Discussion of that species.

C. iodostoma Range Map

This section contains verbatim reproductions of the accounts of 316 species of Conus from the Indo-Pacific region, from Manual of the Living Conidae, by Röckel, Korn and Kohn (1995). They are reproduced with the kind permission of the present publisher, Conchbooks.

All plates and figures referred to in the text are also in Röckel, Korn & Kohn, 1995. Manual of the Living Conidae Vol. 1: Indo-Pacific Region.

The range maps have been modified so that each species account has it own map, rather than one map that showed the ranges of several species in the original work. This was necessary because each species account is on a separate page on the website and not confined to the order of accounts in the book.