Range: Palawan, Philippines.
Description: Small, light to moderately light. Last whorl conical or ventricosely conical to broadly or broadly ventricosely conical; outline variably convex, left side often sigmoid. Shoulder angulate, moderately to weakly tuberculate. Spire of moderate height, outline concave. Larval shell of about 1.75 whorls, maximum diameter 1 mm. Postnuclear spire whorls tuberculate. Teleoconch sutural ramps flat, with 1 increasing to 4-6 spiral grooves. Specimens with granulose spiral ribs from base to shoulder intergrade with specimens with granulose ribs restricted to basal third of last whorl; ribs stronger abapically.
Shell Morphometry | ||
---|---|---|
L | 17-23 mm | |
RW | 0.04-0.09 g/mm | |
RD | 0.66-0.76 | |
PMD | 0.78-0.89 | |
RSH | 0.16-0.22 |
Ground colour white. Last whorl with variably sized brown axial blotches, often fusing into 2 smeary spiral bands within adapical and abapical third. Usually with sparse spiral rows of brown dots and dashes, rarely extending from base to shoulder. Larval shell and a few adjacent sutural ramps pink. Later spire whorls crossed by brown streaks, often partially reduced to brown spots between marginal tubercles. Aperture white.
Habitat and Habits: Reported from shallow coastal waters.
Discussion: C. montillai is closely related to C. boeticus; however, the latter species attains larger size (20-40 mm). Philippine specimens of C. boeticus have generally narrower last whorls (RD 0.54-0.68 vs. 0.66-0.76), smoother, often subangulate shoulders, and pronounced dots around the last whorl. Form ruppellii of C. boeticus is also narrower (RD 0.72 is maximum value in form ruppellii but mean value in C. montillai), has a white larval shell and a largely black-brown, heavily dotted last whorl with a straighter outline. C. boeticus has a somewhat narrower larval shell (max. diameter 0.8 mm) with 2.0 whorls. More detailed information may support the status of C. montillai as either a valid species or a geographic subspecies of C. boeticus. C. montillai has been confused with C. sphacelatus Sowerby, but the latter is a Caribbean species.
C. montillai 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.