Updated Post, Sept. 11, 2025: Learning about olive “forms” has been quite confusing. These brown olives in particular. From what I can gather put simply southeast Florida has 2 species. Note: I’m trying to keep current with the name trails on WoRMS (World Register of Marine Species) :
1) Oliva sayana (Ravenel, 1834) which is the
Lettered Olive
2) Oliva nivosa (Marrat, 1871) which is the Netted Olive >> old name is Oliva reticularis and accepted alternative name by WoRMS is Oliva (Americoliva) nivosa
The brown olives fall under O. nivosa as a subspecies, which is Oliva nivosa bollingi (Clench, 1934) that is accepted as a subspecies by WoRMS. Synonymised names that have the status of “unaccepted” by WoRMS, regarding the same subspecies are: Americoliva bollingi, Americoliva bollingi bollingi, and Americoliva nivosa bollingi. The original name of Oliva nivosa bollingi was Oliva reticularis bollingi.
Bollingi, “Bolling’s Olive” is a current name used for these brown olives. Photos by the shell museum.
Original Post: The first time I heard of a Fulgurator Olive (Oliva fulgurator, Röding, 1798) was when a friend of mine showed me the one her daughter collected on Sanibel Island and was trying to figure out what it was. The next experience I had with them was finding them myself in dredge piles in Palm Beach! Wow those were the HOT shells to find in the piles there for sure! I pulled lots of them out of the dredge piles in 2 different color forms, at that time not knowing the difference I used the name Fulgurator and Bollingi interchangeably (as most other shellers did at those piles).
When I uploaded those dredging episodes to my YouTube channel, I received some comments that lead me to the correct form names for the ones I found. They were all “Fulgurator” Olives but I had found 2 different “forms” of them. I found the forms bifasciata and form formosa. Which are both brown olives. A bollingi is a form of Fulgurator Olive but the bollingi form is not brown like the ones I found. I have learned that there are about 7 different forms of Fulgurator Olives:
bifasciata
bollingi
circinate
formosa
jamaicensis
olorinella
reticularis
In researching these I’ve come across several different name combinations of the 7 different Fulgurator forms. Then I landed on the website “Let’s Talk Seashells” by Marlo F. Krisberg, I was SO happy to find a comprehensive chart on Fulgurators with the 7 different forms of them and that chart page on his site is connected to Jaxshells which goes into even more detail!
In looking at this chart I noticed the Fulgurator form reticularis which is commonly referred to as a Netted Olive (Oliva reticularis) and one comment on my YouTube video about a Fulgurator, was it wasn’t a Fulgurator olive it was Oliva bifasciata but bifasciata IS a “form” of Fulgurator…you see how these names/forms can get confusing? The fact of the matter is that Oliva fulgurator has been presented under several names due to its diverse color variations. It’s like a puzzle of a multiform species.