An extremely variable muricid, Nucella freycinetii is a large dogwhelk ranging from northern
Honshu, Japan to Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia. The sculpture varies from virtually smooth with
only subtle fine striations to tall and elaborate wavy frills (as shown). This is undoubtedly
correlated with the environment, with specimens in calmer and deeper waters generally having
stronger sculpture. The spire height is also rather variable, but this difference seems to be
randomly distributed among populations. A carnivorous and predatory gastropod inhabiting hard
rocky bottoms, it appears to have a wide bathymetric range from intertidal down to about -200m
deep. Although a common species across its range, the extremely frilled form shown here is
mostly restricted to waters deeper than -100m and is rarely seen. Typical shell length around
45mm., extremely large specimens may exceed 70mm. Due to its variability some synonymous
names have been proposed in the past, such as N. alabaster (Pilsbry, 1907) and N. saxicola
(Valenciennes, 1846). The name N. alabaster refers to heavily sculptured specimens with taller
spires and some authors treat it as a subspecies, N. freycinetii alabaster.