Avurudu Panchi a game with cowries Meet a live cowry at the Zoo Aquarium

Avurudu is still fresh  in our homes. Relatives who have not met up in a while are still visiting and Avurudu games that were forgotten are now being played. The rattle of the Panchi is also heard, though it is not as common as in the past.  But do you know that cowries which are used  in a game of panchi are in fact the shell of a sea mollusc and you can get a rare chance to see one alive, and its in the zoo’s Aquarium?

The panchi rattle was a familiar sound during the Avurudu season, decades ago. This clatter sound brings to mind the shiny stones hitting at one another and which pitch on different sound levels. Even if you have never played a game of panchi before, you would have seen it in Avurudu telecasts. But have you paid attention to these attractive milk white and yellowish cowries used in a game of panchi?

On initial look, these cowries’ looks like some kind of stones. But they are in fact the shells of the marine snail popularly known as cowry.  There can be different colours and shapes of cowry shells that belongs to different species, but the yellowish white cowry known as money cowry is mostly used in the game - panchi.

These cowry shells often float to the beach, and you can pick up plenty of them. But since these creatures live in the sea, only deep sea divers could see them live. But have you thought that you could also get a chance to see a live cowry one day? Yes, you can. What you have to do is to visit the zoo’s aquarium. There is no description about the live cowry in the tank it lives in, but you may go to the tank of the marine moray eel. This eel is a nasty looking neighbour for anybody, but even he seems to be tolerant of the live cowry that has suddenly come to share his tank. There is no description or at least mention about the presence of this cowry in the tank indicating that the cowry could be an accidental addition, by its look this cowry seems to be a tiger cowry.

Mollusc in the sea

Cowry is actually a kind of a sea snail which is a mollusc which lives in the sea. Scientifically, they belong to a family of Molluscs Cypraea. The cowry shell is oval shaped like an egg, but the underside is flat. There is also a long, narrow, slit-like opening known as the aperture which is often toothed at the edges. The soft body of the sea snail and the broad muscular foot it uses for crawling could be retracted into the shell, when it feels danger approaching.

The cowry shells are extremely smooth and shiny because in the living animal, the shell is nearly always fully covered with a skin: the mantle. The shell-producing this mantle tissue has two special folds that extend outside the shell in the cowry. These mantle folds keep the shell clean and polished, and prevent damage to the shell surface. The mantle is covered with frilly, branched projections called papillae that look like small fingers. The functions of the papillae are not clear: they may provide camouflage for the animal by breaking up the snail’s outline; or may allow absorption of oxygen from seawater.

The cowry uses its mouth tube to feed on. The Algae is its main diet in their natural habitats and is mostly active at night. During day time it usually hides in its natural habitat, but the cowry in the zoo can be seen attached to the glass wall of the tank throughout the day.

Cowri in Dehiwala Zoo with its neighbor
- Murray Eal

Travel using fleshy foot

The cowry travels by using the “foot” that can be extended from the aperture of the underside. This muscular organ is long and is spread underneath the body and the cowry is able to move forward by making a sort of ripping motion using its foot, say marine experts.  When it moves, the snail leaves behind a bit of slime, which coats the area that it is trying to move along on.  If you watch a snail on a dry surface, you can see that it leaves a trail of slime behind it.  Sea snails are very slow moving creatures and could spend the better part of a day just trying to travel across the yard.

The eyes of the cowry can be found at the base of one pair of tentacles; however, some other species of snails don’t have eyes at all.  They breathe through gills or sometimes through a thin tissue layer called the mantle that wraps around the body of the snail like an envelope.  Sea snails use their gills like a fish would, to retrieve oxygen out of the water.  The gills are found in the cavity of the mantle.

Other sea snails

If you visit the beach, you would find many different kinds of cowries and other shells. These are differently coloured and differently shaped. There is enormous diversity of sea snails say marine biologists. Marine snails make up the majority of the snail family population and they can often be found in fresh water as well as in  salt water. 

Sea snails do have teeth -- not in the common perception of what teeth look like.  They technically have radulas, a very hard organ that looks like a ribbon in appearance and has tiny rows of teeth on it. Some will only have a few teeth while other snails have thousands.  As the teeth wear down, new ones grow. They do not exactly chew their food but rather grind and tear it.  Sea snails are often popular in aquariums, as an accessory, to eat debris from the sides of tanks.

Predators of cowry

The very narrow toothed aperture of the cowry shell keeps the adult sea snails out of danger, frustrating predators. However there are some smart predators which learn the art of how to reach the softer parts of the cowry. Some tropical crustaceans can break the dorsum of a cowry shell and some mollusc-eating cones can inject venom to the cowry’s flesh. The cone then extends its stomach into the cowry shell through the slit and completely digests the flesh.

However, the octopuses are the most fascinating cowry hunters. Some octopuses can make a small hole in the strong cowry shell using a special barb/tooth and an acidic secretion. In the beaches, have you noticed some of the cowry shells have strange looking holes on them..? Perhaps those are the unlucky victims of these cowry eating octopuses.

Game of Avurudu Panchi

Being shiny objects, cowries are often used in jewellery by coastal communities. In some other instances, the cowries have also been used as money. These are known as ‘money cowries’ and the ones used in playing panchi. They are small in size and is of a yellowish marble, off white colour.

When playing panchi, there are two groups and they use lead-filled cowries in a coconut shell and rattle it inside shaking hard and releases them on to another coconut shell. After each toss of the cowries, those that had come to rest with the flat surface upturned scores a point. The points scored by each side are registered by moving one or more of a set of pawns, along a pattern of squares outlined on a wooden board, towards a home-base. The first team to take all the pawns to the home base wins.

Remember - the live cowry can be seen in the murray eel’s tank, at the zoo aquarium. So make a visit this Avurudu season to observe a living cowry which is not a common sight.

Published on 15.04.2012