Conus ebraeus Linnaeus 1758: A New Cone Snail Hosted in Mediterranean

The Mediterranean basin is higly affected by the spread of non-native species (alien spe-cies). Most non-native species originate from the Indo-Pacific domain, via the Suez Chan-nel, and a smaller number are of Atlantic origin and enter the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar. Many other NIS reach the Mediterranean through passive transport via ballastwater, the importation of fish and mollusc species for marine farming facilities, and also due to involuntary and/or voluntary releases by aquarium hobbists. Thanks to ongo-ing environmental monitoring and citizen science, most of these alien species have been recorded over the past 40 years. Molluscs are not exception; infact, thanks to their aestheti-cally pleasing shells, they are collected by ordinary peoples as well as professional re-searchers. It was precisely thanks to research projects aimed at NIS detection that the first record of the species Conus ebraeus Linnaeus 1758 was made for the Mediterranean basin. The first shell of this species was sampled from the coastal seabed of the Vendicari pro-tected natural area (southeastern Sicily) in the spring of 2023. In the following years, four more specimens of this species were found in the same area as the first discovery, while two more specimens of C. ebraeus were found at Portopalo di Capo Passero, in the extreme southeastern part of Sicily, a few kilometers from Vendicari. To date, a total of seven spe-cimens of C. ebraeus have been collected.