What is the rarest Nautilus?
While the golden nautilus is the rarest species, it’s not the only target. All chambered nautiluses are valuable, as are other mollusks, and “deep water mining” for the shell trade is obliterating them all. So many nautilus shells have been sold over the years that in 2016 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species required permits showing they were sustainably harvested. A few years later the United States added them to the Endangered Species Act. They’re also legally protected in Indonesia.
How many Nautilus still exist?
They are “living fossils”. Ancient nautiluses reached up to 10 feet in size, which is much larger than their current maximum size of 10 inches. Although there were originally over 10,000 different species of nautilus, only six species remain and are found in the Pacific and Indian Ocean. Nautiluses are only found in a very small region of the world, called the Indopacific triangle, and unless we can slow their slaughter, we will lose this 500-million-year-old creature in less than 50 years.