Range: Japan to Philippines, N.W. Australia, Loyalty Is., and New Caledonia; also Mozambique. Recently reported from Réunion.

Description: Moderately large, moderately solid to solid. Last whorl usually slightly pyriform, outline slightly sigmoid. Shoulder broadly carinate. Spire of moderate height, outline concave to slightly sigmoid. Larval shell of about 3.75 whorls, maximum diameter 1.1-1.2 mm. Postnuclear spire whorls carinate, first 2-5 also tuberculate. Teleoconch sutural ramps concave, with regularly set axial threads and fine obsolete spiral striae; in some specimens, first 2 ramps with 1-2 weak spiral grooves. Last whorl with pronounced spiral ribbons on abapical fourth, sometimes grading to ribs at base.

Ground colour white to bluish violet. Last whorl with irregular confluent brown blotches forming a usually incomplete spiral band on each side of centre. Spiral rows of brown dots extend from base to shoulder but vary in number and arrangement. Larval whorls beige. Teleoconch sutural ramps with widely spaced brown dots along carinate outer margins, sometimes also with scattered brown axial markings. Aperture generally somewhat translucent, white in large adults.

Periostracum greyish brown and translucent, thicker and opaque on sutural ramps.

Habitat and Habits: In 50-560 m. Outside the New Caledonia lagoon, the species has been dredged in 340-560 m (Forges & Estival, 1984); in Philippines dredged in 240-400 m (Guillot de Suduiraut, pers. comm., 1992).

Discussion: C. ione is similar to C. lenavati and C. sieboldii. C. lenavati has a more solid shell with an often broader last whorl (RD 0.56-0.71) and a lower spire (RSH 0.02-0.13); its postnuclear whorls are not carinate, its flat sutural ramps bear pronounced spiral grooves, and spirally arranged brown dots are absent from its last whorl and the outer margins of its sutural ramps. For comparison with C. sieboldii, see the DISCUSSION of that species.

C. ione 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.