Between a rock and a hard place? That’s just where Lithoredo likes it.
Researchers found the new-to-science shipworm, a kind of clam, in the Abatan River on the Philippines’ Bohol Island. It was a stunning sight.
“It is unlike any other shipworm, both in its appearance and its unusual habits, and this was apparent from the very first moment I laid eyes on it,” says marine biologist Dan Distel, executive director of the Ocean Genome Legacy Center at Northeastern University and senior author of the June paper describing the animal in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Shipworms got their name because they bore through wood that’s in contact with water, eating the material. They leave behind tunnels lined with the calcium carbonate that they secrete, similar to the way their clam kin build shells. Shipworms have been a maritime plague for millennia, destroying boats and piers. But ...
