2,000-year-old mystery of havoc-wreaking shipworms

[Still Waters]

Humans have known for over 2,000 years that shipworms, a worm-like mollusk, are responsible for damage to wooden boats, docks, dikes and piers. Yet new research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst published in Frontiers in Microbiology reveals that we still don't know the most basic thing about them: how they eat.

"It's unbelievable," says Reuben Shipway, adjunct assistant professor in microbiology at UMass Amherst, research fellow at the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and one of the paper's authors. "The ancient Greeks wrote about them, Christopher Columbus lost his fleet due to what he called 'the havoc which the worm had wrought," and, today, shipworms cause billions of dollars of damage a year."

Shipworms also play a key role in mangrove forest ecosystems, found throughout the world's tropical regions, and are responsible for cycling a huge amount of carbon through the web of life. "Yet," says Shipway, "we still don't know how they do what they do."

https://phys.org/news/2021-07-year-old-mystery-havoc-wreaking-worm.html

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How Do Shipworms Eat Wood?

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/