#4846 · 🐌 snails, slugs & other molluscs
Knobbed Whelk
Busycon carica
🐌 Snails, slugs & other molluscs 📍 outside Europe
7 photos from iNaturalist (Creative Commons) · credits & licences
what is it?
The knobbed whelk ( Busycon carica ) is a species of very large predatory sea snail, or in the USA, a whelk, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Busyconidae, the busycon whelks.
base stats
Bars compare against all animals on log scales: up to 300,000 Dutch and 600,000 worldwide sightings (the most-seen species), 150 t (blue whale), 30 m and 400 years (Greenland shark).
fun facts
- No confirmed wild sightings in the Netherlands on iNaturalist: you'd have to travel for this one.
- 6,920 observations worldwide on iNaturalist.
- Scientifically named by Johann Friedrich Gmelin in 1791 (235 years ago).
fact sheet
- English
- Knobbed Whelk
- scientific name
- Busycon carica
- class
- Gastropoda
- order
- Neogastropoda
- family
- Busyconidae
- sightings in NL
- 0
- sightings worldwide
- 6,920
- GBIF records in NL
- 1
- weight
- —
- length
- —
- lifespan
- —
- named
- 1791 by Johann Friedrich Gmelin
Sources: iNaturalist taxon 208724, Wikidata Q310059, GBIF 2302937, Wikipedia (EN), Wikipedia (NL). Intro text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).Updated 2026-10-24.