Shipworms Cause Ships to Sink, Wharves to Collapse; Mystery Remains for Thousands of Years

For thousands of years already, shipworms have been causing ships to sink and wharves to collapse with their voracious appetites.

A ScienceAlert report said, at present, it remains unknown how these "termites of the sea" devour so much woody plant material as quickly as they do.

Shipworms are voracious munchers of wood. For thousands of years, these 'termites of the sea' have been sinking ships and collapsing wharves with their insatiable appetites.

According to the United Kingdom-based University of Portsmouth microbiologist Reuben Shipway, it is unbelievable. He added, the ancient Greeks wrote them, "Christopher Columbus lost his fleet" because of what he considered as the havoc which the shipworm had wrought, and presently, they cause billions of dollars of damage each year.

Mystery Remains

And yet still, shipworms remain a mystery. Compared to wood-eating animals on land like termites, shipworms have been greatly neglected by scientists.

Consequently, only a little is known about how these base marine organisms are digesting woody plant materials. Typically, digestion has to do with microbes, although shipworms, which are in fact, saltwater clams, have only recently been discovered to possess surprisingly sterile guts.

While their gills can send enzymes to digest cellulose when required, study authors cannot figure out how the bivalves work through lignin, which is the "concrete" in which the wood's sugars are embedded.

Different from wood-devouring animals on lands like earthworms and termites, shipworms do not appear to tackle lignin in a similar way. They are missing the enzymes typically breaking down this tough material.

The Stefanos Stravoravdis, a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst said, he combed through the whole genomes of five different shipworm species, looking for particular protein groups which generate the enzymes that they, in the field, know, are capable of digesting lignin.

His search, he elaborated, turned up nothing. It has remained a mystery, how shipworms are digesting all that wood.

'Hemocyanins' Secreted

The previous study on these saltwater clams has been unsuccessful as well, to identify any enzymes known to break down lignin, only those breaking down cellulose.

Still, enzymes are not the only way an organism can wrestle woody material. The gribble worm, for example, is described as another "wood-boring marine crustacean" that does not use enzymes to break down the lignin in its diets.

Rather, a similar Chop News report said the gribble is secreting hemocyanins in its guts, which are proteins, making lignin more porous, enabling other enzymes to penetrate and break down the cellulose inside.

Some fungi use a non-enzymatic strategy too when gobbling up wood. The brown rot fungi, for example, supplement a small suite of gut enzymes, with a range of reactive oxygen species, which can break down lignin even more rapidly than enzymes.

Probably, the researchers wrote in their study, "How do shipworms eat wood? Screening shipworm gill symbiont genomes for lignin-modifying enzymes", published Frontiers in Microbiology, shipworms are doing something similar.

Accessing Biofuels, a Costly and Ineffective Process

While these marine crustaceans are much less of a trouble to today's infrastructure, they remain key players in certain ecosystems.

They are worth identifying, especially since their digestive system could help to ultimately source greener energy forms from leftover wood.

At present, accessing biofuels within surplus wood is a costly and ineffective process. However, there might be something people can learn from animals and fungi that have been dealing with this tough substrate for much longer than human existence.

Related information about shipworm is shown on Tech Insider's YouTube video below:

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