Chambered Nautilus

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The Chambered Nautilus (Nautilus pompilius) is the best known species of nautilus. The shell, when cut away as in the photograph below, reveals a lining of lustrous nacre, and displays a nearly perfect equiangular spiral.

Subspecies

Two subspecies of N. pompilius have been described:

• Nautilus pompilius pompilius Linnaeus, 1758
• Nautilus pompilius suluensis Habe & Okutani, 1988

The first subspecies is by far the most common and widespread of all nautlises. It is sometimes called the Emperor Nautilus due to its large size. The distribution of N. p. pompilius covers the Andaman Sea east to Fiji and southern Japan south to the Great Barrier Reef. Exceptionally large specimens with a shell diameter of up to 268 mm have been recorded from Indonesia and northern Australia. This giant form was described as Nautilus repertus (Iredale, 1944), however most scientists do not consider it a separate species.

N. p. suluensis is a much smaller animal, restricted to the Sulu Sea in the southwestern area of the Philippines, after which it is named. The largest recorded specimen measured 148 mm in shell diameter.

The Chambered Nautilus in literature and art

Small natural history collections were common in mid-1800s Victorian homes, and chambered nautilus shells were popular decorations.

The Chambered Nautilus is the title and subject of a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, in which he admires the "ship of pearl" and the "silent toil/That spread his lustrous coil/Still, as the spiral grew/He left the past year's dwelling for the new." He concludes with the peroration:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

A painting by Andrew Wyeth, entitled "Chambered Nautilus," shows a woman in a canopied bed; the composition and proportions of the bed and the window behind it mirror those of a chambered nautilus lying on a nearby table.

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