Bellybutton nautilus

How it lives

Lives on the continental shelf and slope at depths of 0 to 500 m. By day it is usually at several hundred metres. A shell study estimated a habitat depth of about 140 m before hatching and about 370 m after hatching, averaged over time and space. It adjusts gas in the chambers of its shell to move up and down. Nautiluses grow slowly: for chambered nautiluses in general, NOAA gives lifespans of 15 to 20 years or more, maturity at around 10 to 15 years, and a small number of eggs that need at least a year to develop.

Where it goes

Nautiluses live just above the bottom and move up and down the slope. By day this species stays at depths of several hundred metres, and at night it rises into much shallower water, about 2 to 20 m, to feed. No long-distance migration is described in the sources checked.

We only draw a journey on the map when scientists have tracked it or clearly documented it. For this animal we have not found one yet.

Populations

IUCN lists it as Data Deficient, so there is not enough information to judge its risk. SeaLifeBase gives the assessment date as 30 April 2022, and Wikipedia cites a 2024 IUCN listing by Allcock, Williams and Barord. The whole nautilus family was added to CITES Appendix II at the 2016 meeting. In New Caledonia, commercial trapping took place from 1976 to 1989, with more than 3,000 traps and more than 7,000 animals caught in an unpublished study cited in 2017. The same paper noted that in 2012 there was no fishery and no commercial interest, and that the population was assumed to have returned to balance, which has not been checked. Elsewhere, for example in the central Philippines, heavy trapping of another nautilus species caused trap yields to fall and the fishery to collapse.