Many clues suggest this, according to the paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in which a team of scientists working in the United States and the Philippines announce the discovery in June. But the newest worm on the block - whose DNA confirms its shipworm ancestry - seems to have tossed that shipworm rule and a bunch of others right out the window. Until now, every known shipworm required wood for at least part of its life cycle. The bill for their take-out runs into the billions each year. They don’t just excavate wood, like carpenter ants. 2019Īs a group, shipworms are notorious devourers of wooden ships, docks, and piers.

Siphons (Si) of living shipworms protrude from their calcareous burrow linings(CBL). To replace the valves’ protective function, the worm secretes a hard calcareous tube around itself tipped by a retractable two-doored tailgate of the same material. They converted their bivalves from body-enclosing shells into jaws for gnawing wood. Shipworms are a group of bivalve mollusks (like clams and oysters) that decided being shellfish was lame and took up tubeworming instead. Well, that and these newly described animals – formally dubbed Lithoredo abatanica - are now the only animals we know of that can eat the bones of the Earth itself. Limestone riddled with empty burrows of L. And everywhere the shipworm drills, the rock is sure to go. Inside armored tunnels in the bedrock of a river in the Philippines, there lives a humble shipworm whose gut is filled with stone.

But I Don't Eat Ants by Dan Marvin