This translucent shipworm eats rocks and poops sand. To me as a sand enthusiast it’s an immediate like! Why it chews on rocks is an exciting unknown.
Photo: Courtesy of Dan Distel.
“Look at in the rocks at the bottom of the river” was a tip from a local that led a research team to the discovery of an entirely new species of shipworms – the Lithoredo
Unlike all other known shipworms, this translucent beauty doesn’t eat wood as ship bottoms but chew on rocks. What’s left comes out as sand. The animal lives in
This
The unknown is the exciting
Why and how this clam eats rock, is still to be figured out. ”The rock has no nutrients so there’s nothing much in there that this animal could live on” professor Dan Distel at Northeastern University, USA, says. “That tells us it’s doing something else. And what that something else
The discovery of a creature that eats

