The « Veitch's Wateringpot » is a strange and wonderful penicillid endemic to Western Australia and Southern Australia, Australia; best known from the Great Australian Bight. It is a member of the bivalve superfamily Clavagelloidea, characterised by their remarkable behaviour of switching from growing the true shell to building a calcareous tube, called the adventitious tube. At the earliest stages of life after settlement it bears a normal bivalved shell, which is still attached to the outside of the adventitious tube and visible; although in this species it is largely incorporated into the tube. Uniquely among penicillids its adventitious tube is strongly bulbous at the « watering-pot » end, divided into hundreds of small tubes, and is not distinctively fringed like most other species. A filter-feeding species, it appears to be restricted to soft bottoms of seagrass beds (such as Posidonia sp.) and inhabit subtidal waters down to about 50m deep. In life it lives vertically buried with the « watering-pot » end down. Although probably only uncomm.on locally, it is rarely seen in the international shell trade market. Previously it has been placed in the genus Brechites and then Foegia, but after detailed anatomical investigation a new genus, Kendrickiana, was erected to house it; it is currently the only species placed in that genus. Typical length of the adventitious tube around 200mm., although very large specimens are known to exceed even 370mm.

Broome, Kimberley, Western Australia, Australia