Range: W. Australia from Albany area to N. W. Cape.

Description: Moderately small to medium-sized, moderately light to moderately solid. Last whorl ventricosely conical or ovate; outline convex adapically, less so toward base; left side straight to slightly concave or constricted near base. Shoulder rounded. Spire of moderate height, outline convex. Larval shell of 1.75-2 whorls, maximum diameter 1.2-1.5 mm. Teleoconch sutural ramps flat to moderately convex, with 2 increasing to 5-8 spiral grooves. Last whorl with fine and closely spaced spiral ribs; ribs may be obsolete adapically.

Ground colour white or pinkish grey. Last whorl with spiral rows of alternating white and yellow to orangish brown dots, dashes, spots or bars and with confluent yellow to orangish brown flames and clouds that may be concentrated in 2-3 spiral bands. Larval whorls white, violet or pale brown. Postnuclear sutural ramps with yellow to orangish brown radial markings. Pattern elements often weak or absent both on spire and last whorl. Aperture white to light pink.

Periostracum pale brown, thin, translucent, smooth.

Animal reported to be pale cream (Turnbull, pers. comm., 1987).

Habitat and Habits: Intertidal to 100 m; a sand-dwelling species also living on limestone platforms, beneath rocks or among granite boulders intertidally and in sand pockets subtidally. In southern W. Australia, C. cocceus co-occurs with C. dorreensis.

Discussion: C. cocceus is most similar to C. catus. C. catus is often broader (RD to 0.78) and its sculpture varies from smooth with only a few weak basal spiral ribs, to strong, broad ribs from base to shoulder. It does not have the fine, closely spaced spiral ribs characteristic of C. cocceus. C. catus also has tubercles on the early postnuclear whorls and its larval shell is half as broad as that of C. cocceus. C. cocceus sometimes resembles C. gabelishi, C. anemone and C. clarus; for comparison, see the Discussions of those species.

C. cocceus 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.