Heavily sculptured predatory snails that drill a neat round hole through the shell of their prey.
Thick-shelled snails with a raised sculpture of spiral cords crossed by axial ribs, and in many species a set of three or more raised varices running down the shell that carry spines, blades or branched fronds. The front of the aperture is drawn out into a long open siphonal canal, often as long as the rest of the shell, and that canal is the character that places the family at a glance. Chicoreus, Murex, Homalocantha and Drupella are among the genera in the region. A living animal is rarely as clean as a shell in a market: the sculpture collects encrusting growth, and an active muricid is usually grey with sponge, algae and silt.
They are predators on other molluscs. The snail holds a bivalve or another gastropod with the foot and works a hole through the shell with the radula, softening the shell as it goes with secretions from a gland in the sole of the foot, then feeds through the opening. Empty bivalve shells with a single small countersunk hole are the sign of it, and they are common on a muck slope once looked for. Barnacles and tube worms are taken as well, and Drupella feeds on living coral, where numbers can be high enough to leave bare white patches.
Most are nocturnal, buried or under rubble by day and out on sediment and rock at night. The eggs are laid as clusters of tough horny capsules stuck to hard surfaces, often by several animals on the same patch, and the capsules persist long after they have hatched. Species are separated on the shell sculpture, which is worn and overgrown on live animals, so records normally stay at the genus. Recorded from the shallows to about 30 m.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.