A golden cowry, Cypraea aurantium, crawls in front of a clump of Halimeda algae. The cowry's shiny, bright orange shell is here nearly covered by the animal's mantle, a thin layer of tissue that creates the shell. Cowries remain shiny in life because this mantle covers the entire shell, unlike most other mollusks in which the mantle is only present out to the edge of the shell's aperture. The mantle also serves to hide the shell. Even though the golden comes out of hiding only at night, perhaps the sharp eyes of nocturnal predators can see the glint off a cowry's shiny shell in moonlight; covering the shiny shell with a camouflage patterned mantle should help prevent them from being seen. Even so, we see a fair number of shells that have been crushed up by some predator, so the disguise is obviously not perfect.