Whelks are little cone-shaped univalves. After sixteen pages of Google image search, I haven't spotted the right type of shell, but this is the closest (and it's not very close) : http://www.dkimages.com/discover/DKIMAGES/...og-Whelk-1.html The whelks I'm thinking of produce a shell that is proportioned more like the Great Pyramid, and the spiral is a lot tighter. My father used to take the family down to the Bahamas for Christmas every year. We stayed on one of the "out islands" (nowadays, it's a major resort) with some people who had put together a few rental apartments for vacationers. One year, the landlord convinced my father that "whelk stew" was a local delicacy. Indeed, having read about it a few times since, I'm sure that sometimes it was. However, when he and my father went out and gathered a few hundred whelks, ripped them untimely from their shells, and made the stew, it smelled largely of iodine. And it tasted solely of iodine. Couldn't taste anything else over the iodine. Nothing. And as far as the textures go, it was not-watery-enough iodine broth with chunks of tough rubber whelkmeat in it. My father claims to have enjoyed it. I still don't understand how.
