Home › Volumes › Shells › Cephalopods

Chambered Nautilus

Tropical seas near the Fiji Islands, New Hebrides, New Caledonia and the Philippines are the most populous homes of the Nautilus. So far as is now known, specimens are obtainable in the greatest numbers on the southern coasts of the Island of Negros in the Philippines, at depths between 1,800 and 2,200 feet. Some say schools of Nautili may be seen afloat. Others deny this, insisting, in spite of what sailors tell and "poets feign," that they never come up except when in a moribund condition. In this case, they appear only at intervals and solitary.

A normal Nautilus is a stay-at-home body, which forages industriously on the sea bottom, chasing its favourite quarry, the crabs, in and out among the coral rocks.

In the Philippines there is no local demand for Nautili or their shells that would justify any direct effort to obtain them. The mollusks are attracted by the baits lowered by fishermen, and blundering into the traps, they are hauled up with the legitimate catch. They are therefore, well described as "a by-product of deep sea fishing." The fishermen pay little more attention to them than the fish do. Some are eaten by the natives, who pay about four cents apiece for them. They are used as a soup meat, or simply boiled; but their flesh is of indifferent quality. Dippers are made of the shells. Vases are sometimes elaborately carved. A rude kind of spoon is also cut out for home use. A recent development is the demand for the shells in China for the manufacture of buttons and ornaments. It is reported by Bash-ford Dean, who spent a short time on the fishing grounds in 1901, that a Chinaman who made a tour of the fisheries clustered on the opposing shores of Cebu and Negros was able to pick up three thousand shells for export.

An increasing number of fishermen are trapping Nautili for the shells for export. In early summer, after the windy winter season is over and a calm lies on the water, the fishing begins in earnest. June is the best month of all. The fishermen bring their fish-traps, woven bamboo splint "bo-bos" with a coneshaped entrance, much like a live trap for rats. Daily or every few days the fisherman hauls up his traps, removes his catch of four or five Nautili by a trap door in the bottom of the cage, renews the bait and lets the traps go down again.

The field has in recent years been visited by naturalists, eager to collect this mollusk in quantity, for museums and university collections. Arthur Willey experimented with different kinds of bait, and stated in his 1897 report:

One of the surest ways of obtaining Nautili, and, in fact the method by which I have obtained most of my specimens at Lifu, is to bait the fish basket with the cooked and bruised exoskeleton of a crab, Palinurus, or an allied form. The strongly scented potage so produced is then wrapped up in cocoanut fibre, like a small parcel and then placed in the fish trap over night. There is, therefore, nothing to be seen; but on the other hand there is something to be smelt, and by this means I have obtained as many as ten Nautili at one time.

In Paris, quantities of Nautilus shells are used in the finest cameo-cutting, and in making pearl ornaments. In India the shells are ornamented and used as drinking cups. In America they are valued as cabinet specimens. A dealer in shells in New York will charge $2.50 to $5.00 for a good-sized and perfect specimen. In San Francisco you need not pay so much, and you have a better stock to choose from. It is possible to get shells sawed in two, revealing the many chambers into which the spire is divided. If the surface layer of limy substance has been rubbed off by the use of a dilute acid, the shell is pearly throughout, one of the largest, most beautiful and most interesting shells to be found in any collection.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes has established the Pearly Nautilus, with all the charm of myth and poetry upon it, in the minds and hearts of all English-speaking people. The ship of pearl is not more beautiful than are the lines in which the poet has described it and interpreted its heavenly message.