Talk:Whelk

A note

Should this redirect to Dog Whelk? If no one objects, I'll do that tomorrow or the next day. Jwrosenzweig 00:40, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

One more chance....I'll redirect tomorrow unless someone can tell me I'm wrong and these aren't the same beasties. :-) Jwrosenzweig 23:19, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Maybe merge it with dog whelk...Atlantima 00:54, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Neither, it would be wrong. See List of whelks. Dysmorodrepanis 01:25, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Shoulder?

This article refers to the shoulder of a whelk. For some reason I don't think that that is the correct term =) Craig Pemberton (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 22:21, 21 July 2009 (UTC).

Odd though it may sound, in reality the word "shoulder" when it is applied to the anatomy of a gastropod shell is a perfectly legitimate term that means a flat area below the suture of the shell. Invertzoo (talk) 16:05, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Location

I have seen thousands of these on the coasts of Louisiana and Texas, so I removed the sentence about their locality being only from Cape Cod to Florida in the USA. I will replace it as soon as I get a reference for a better statement. --DanielCD 16:33, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Pic

I added a pic of a whelk shell I found. It's not the greatest, but it's better than no pic at all. Anyone who has a better pic is welcome to replace it. --DanielCD 01:56, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

DanielCD, thanks for the picture. : - ) FloNight ^talk 02:26, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Is there a chance we could get pictures that have something to give a sense of scale. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.94.30.6 (talk) 05:02, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Merger

I don't think we need to merge this with the List of Whelks. We need an article on whelks in general. Perhaps the list should be moved here. --DanielCD 20:47, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

I totally agree! Do not merge. Wbroun 18:04, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

I moved the "List of Whelks" material here. I think it all belongs in the same article. --DanielCD 22:42, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I've just copy edited this article and it appears to me that most of the content should be moved to Busycon and this page should become a disambiguation page since the term whelk does not refer to a monophyletic group and is therefore not well-defined. Craig Pemberton (talk)

cooking

you can find them in just about any restaurant? uh, really?

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Whelk's chance in a supernova

"A whelk's chance in a supernova," repeated Ford without losing momentum. "The ..."

"What's a whelk got to do with a supernova?" said Arthur.

"It doesn't," said Ford levelly, "stand a chance in one." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.9.112.63 (talk) 23:35, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I cut this down a lot because the source is under copyright. It is of course a quote from the book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Invertzoo (talk) 00:46, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Genera and family are mixed up--or something

Someone who knows a bit about mollusk taxonomy--and I bet you're everywhere--needs to look at this.

This article deals with any animal commonly called a "whelk" anywhere. Fair enough. But it should make a clear distinction between the more restricted use of the name "whelks" by scientists and anyone else. Maybe, e.g., make a list of species and genera in the family Buccinidae ("true whelks"), and then list any other species that are in other families but may still be called "whelks" in local or traditional usage.

I started to see if I could easily straighten this out, using definitions of scientific names provided already, but I can't. There seems to be a problem with the definitions of the scientific names.

Basically: There is a family called Buccinidae and it is known as the "true whelks". OK, fine, I'll sort out the whelks (generic name) that are "true whelks," which will be in the family Buccinidae, and others that are just called "whelks" through local usage. Except, if one goes to the article on Buccinidae, it says:

"Buccinidae is a very large and diverse taxonomic family of large sea snails, often known as whelks or true whelks (to distinguish them from the Busycon whelks)"

but when one goes to Busycon it says:

"Busycon is a genus of very large edible marine gastropods in the family Buccinidae"

So Buccinidae is a *family* that is called true whelks to distinguish it from the Busycon whelks... but Busycon is defined as a *genus* WITHIN the family Buccinidae.

And in this list in the article "Whelk" Buccinidae is listed as a *genus*.

Could it be that the entire list is made up of the family Buccinidae, that is, all "true whelks"? Well, no. For example, there's Cabestana, defined as follows:

"Cabestana is a genus of medium to large sea snails known as predatory whelks, marine gastropod mollusks in the family Ranellidae, the (tritons)."

So I guess it's an example of a whelk that's not a true whelk. There are probably others in this list but I haven't checked them all.

To outline:

• It seems to make sense to have two lists of whelk species, one list of the "true whelks" and another of species commonly called "whelks" for whatever reason
• but to do that it's necessary to define "true whelk" unambiguously
• and to do that requires fixing at least the article on Buccinidae

The Buccinidae article (at least) needs to be fixed, independent of anything in this article. Doprendek (talk) 19:52, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Doprendek, for bring this to the attention of WikiProject Gastropods. Part of the problem here is the perennial problem of common names, which are applied extremely loosely and casually, and very often do not correspond very well at all to the scientific classification of groups. But the other problem is that gastropod taxonomy has been greatly in flux recently. Although taxoboxes have been mostly kept up to date, the text in various articles (especially general articles) has not always been updated to reflect those changes. I will try to see what I can do to fix this. Thanks again, your note was very helpful! These more general gastropod articles are very often consulted by the general public, and need to be kept in good condition. Invertzoo (talk) 16:03, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Having looked more closely at the article in its new state, although I appreciate all the hard work you put into it, I personally don't think it's a good idea to try to have in the "whelk" article a simple alphabetical list of all of the species that are sometimes called "whelks" (common names vary a great deal from one area to the next, even within the same country, and some authors of field guides give species "common names" that are never used by the general public and which also often vary tremendously from one author to the next). I personally believe that a list would be not end up being very helpful to readers; the family Buccinidae alone has over 1500 species. (By the way, from the whelk genera list I had to remove 6 names that were actually subfamily, family or superfamily names.) It's true that we need to expand the Whelk article, and it's not very good as it stood, but I believe that a long list of species or even genera is probably not the way to go. I am happy to hear other suggestions or opinions. Best wishes, Invertzoo (talk) 16:26, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that is exactly as Invertzoo said. Listing all species is not useful. This article should provide practical and useful informations and there is need to to use common sense how to describe this term for ordinary people. There can be written that as whelks are usually referred this, this and this. There is even no need to trying to create the complete list of names that contain "whelk" in its common name. This would be useless, similarly as writing list of all animals that contain for example word "winged" or word "red". The term "whelk" is absolutely unrelated to scientific classification. If you wish to list some of the most common examples of whelks, you should list scientific name and common name. In this case, the shorter list (as short as possible) will be much more useful than longer one. --Snek01 (talk) 19:30, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

scungilli

scungilli redirects here, but no reference to where the word is from or what it refers to. I saw it referred to on the Food Network as 'fish'. 76.21.107.221 (talk) 06:31, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Scungilli is another name for conch used as food. Originally Scungilli had its own article in wikipedia (in 2006), but it has been merged with whelk in 2007. JoJan (talk) 15:02, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

So are conchs and whelks the same things? They don't seem to be, based on a cursory look at the Conch article and this one. Maybe Scungilli should redirect to Conch instead of Whelk? Scungilli definitely refers to sea snail in particular and not fish in general (it's an Italian word), and it seems like it shouldn't be overly difficult to find a source that says as much, even though scungilli doesn't necessarily refer to one or more specific species of sea snail. —2601:19A:4300:6E00:70E1:89F5:8ECC:7DB9 (talk) 13:11, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Elvis Presley

I wonder whether it is of enough interest to put in this article that whelks were the favourite sea food of Elvis Presley? ACEOREVIVED (talk) 21:16, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

Colour

The color of whelk-dyed cloth is said to get better with age: "Dog whelk, a predatory species, was used in antiquity to make a rich red dye that improves in color as it ages." But this is what Bede says. Is there scientific evidence that the color improves with age? If not, let's say "according to Bede," no? 2603:7000:39F0:8EC0:11C2:F400:9F72:E172 (talk) 04:20, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

Surely there must be a more recent (and scientific) reference to the characteristics of Dog Whelk dye than something written over 1,290 years ago? Anyway, in the meantime I would say that either adding “according to Bede” or striking mention of colour strengthening entirely should be implemented. Sprite96 (talk) 07:27, 9 July 2024 (UTC)