Bohara shellfish

As mentioned earlier, ‘bohara’ is my favourite type of shellfish. It’s small and not as chewy as some of the others. I don’t know what it’s called in English. Rebekah did some research a while ago and thought that they might be a type of ‘cone snail’, so maybe that’s what they are. Most cone snails are fatally poisonous if they sting you, and some aren’t fatal, but they still hurt. However ‘bohara’ do not sting or ‘bite’ or hurt us in any way, so in that way, they don’t quite fit into the description of ‘cone snail’. They do look like the pictures of cone snails on the internet though.

Anyway, to answer your question of ‘what is bohara?’ – here are some photos.

Bohara with shellfish still inside it:

Clean bohara shell:

Empty bohara shell:

Cooked bohara shellfish (quite close up):

Shellfish

I’ve been wanting to go looking for my favourite type of shellfish since I arrived back in Bougainville (it’s called ‘bohara’ in Teop, and I’ll write a blog post about it in a few weeks). One day two ladies from the next village were passing through on their way to collect shellfish, and I was able to tag along with them .

We wandered in the shallows looking for shellfish in the water. I wasn’t very good at finding them – I only found one, and a big one at that, so probably the easiest kind to find. Here’s a picture of the kind of shell I found:

Fortunately my friends were generous and shared their shells with me (including some bohara!), so I returned to the village with this basket of shells:

We cooked them up and had them for dinner. These two photos show the cooked shellfish, removed from their shells, before we mixed them with vegies and noodles.