Range: Bay of Bengal to Philippines and to Japan.

Description: Medium-sized to large, solid to heavy. Last whorl conical to broadly conical; outline convex below shoulder, straight towards base. Shoulder angulate to rounded. Spire of low to moderate height; early whorls projecting from an otherwise flat spire. First 5-6 postnuclear whorls tuberculate. Teleoconch sutural ramps flat, with 2 deep spiral grooves increasing to 3-4 major grooves and several spiral striae. Last whorl with weak or strong, alternating fine and coarse spiral ribs near base.

Ground colour white. Last whorl with often wavy, brown to reddish brown axial dashes, lines and blotches, with small triangular flecks, and near base with spirally aligned spots. Pattern elements clustered in 3 spiral zones, below shoulder and on both sides of centre; adapical zones accentuated by an underlaying salmon or brown band. Teleoconch sutural ramps crossed by brown blotches. Aperture yellow.

Periostracum yellowish brown, thin and translucent.

Sole of foot white mottled with tan. Rostrum yellowish buff. Siphon with a central black ring separating a white anterior part from a mottled brown and buff posterior part (Kohn, unpubl. observ.).

Habitat and Habits: Subtidal, to 30 m; on sand.

Discussion: C. caracteristicus resembles C. zeylanicus, which co- occurs in the E. Indian Ocean. However, it differs from the latter in its coarser colour pattern without pink or violet tones, strictly conical last whorl, and more pronounced spiral sculpture of the sutural ramps. The colour patterns of the animals are also different.

C. caracteristicus 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.