You ’d recollect an animal that powderise rock’n’roll must be a unfearing creature , but in a twist of evolution only Mother Nature can forge , it is a soft , chubby creature that chows down on rock and poops out the cadaver as sand .
The shipworm wasfoundin the low banks of the Abatan River in the Philippines . scientist were first tipped off to the species(Lithoredo abatanica ) by locals who told tales of a creature called " antingaw " that wipe out rock and is given to young mothers to cause suckling .
The investigator investigate the scene with a power hammer and chisel in script and “ splashed around in the river , ” much to the bemusement of the locals . They discovered that these mollusks do indeed munch their way through limestone bedrock , burrow thick tunnel with their pudgy bodies .
" Cracking reach the rock and seeing these chubby minuscule worm flop out was really , really coolheaded , " said lead source Reuben Shipway , a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University , to IFLScience . " We knew we had hit teredinid gold .
" Most teredinid are farsighted , skinny , and worm - like – usually as big as your pinkie in terms of thickness , so these ones are really quite dissimilar , " add together Shipway . " These animal are quite embonpoint , robust . They look really different . Where they get their nutrition we do n’t jazz . "
Shipworms are so - refer for their wood - eating proclivities , devouring their way through ship bottoms , docking facility , and Sir Henry Wood submerge from wrecks . They have pull in notoriety over the retiring couple of millennium as a threat to sailing excursion . Perhaps most famously , Christopher Columbus’fourth voyagewas besiege by shipworm boring honeycomb - similar holes into his vas off the sea-coast of Jamaica .
Being stranded in Jamaica " sounds quite dainty now but it was awful at the time . He even sent a letter of the alphabet to the King and Queen of Spain state ‘ please send all vessels ’ . So these animals were a major , major problem , " say Shipway .
Until now , all old teredinid calibre through wood , but not so it seems for this soft - bodied , in - thick mollusk . In fact , the Abatan River is the only area on Earth that we know of where creatures like this exist . The squad believesL. abatanicais a dominant ecosystem engine driver in its fresh water habitat , drive niche existence and complexness that likely alters the course of the river in profound ways .
" These animal will actually switch the course of the river over time , and what they essentially do is break up these really , really big slice of bedrock that form the foundation of this river and they essentially just flex it into sand , " said Shipway . " This appendage is call macrobioerosion and has only been seen very rarely and recently in a freshwater environs .
" The burrows that these beast go out behind are habitat for lots of other creature : small Pisces live in these tunnel , prawn , crabs , all kinds of minor invertebrates . "
The mollusk is also a part of the local culinary art . For preparation , they cut it down the midway , invert it inside - out , and rinse it well to remove all the Baroness Dudevant .
" It is well eat raw dipped in a pickle sauce known as kinilaw ( vinegar , onions , gingerroot and a bit of saltiness ) , " said Ms Warlita Manug Armildez of Bohol , Philippines . " It has a slippy but somewhat crunchy texture , but if entrust in the vinegar for too long it becomes piano . It has a fishy seafood gustatory sensation , a bit like ocean cucumber , before dip in the sauce . "
How exactlyL. abatanicaperforms its own digestive feat , however , remains to be solved . When the squad take apart and analyse the shipworm ’s gut , it was full of mineral content matching the I. F. Stone they tunnel in . Many invertebrate species burrow in pit , but none to the team ’s knowledge actually ingest the substance too .
" Most other teredinid are heavy adapted for wood digestion , so they have these really belittled , okay astute denticle , " articulate Shipway . " But in this stone bore bit , the shells have these social organization on them that look like shovel for more uncouth excavation of the rock . They have this big , blockheaded heftiness that attach to the valve and powers this practise through the rock . "
The team salute many theories for why they ’ve adapted to use up rock . For instance , the rock may help with digestion similar to the gizzard stones of certain birds and reptiles . Alternatively , it ’s also possible that like other shipworm members , they employ a symbiont - dependent mode of digestion .
" Lots of other coinage of shipworms rely on their gill symbionts to supply the nutrition . Our next research antecedence is to check whether these symbionts are present in these gills and test to fancy out if they are help oneself to ply nutrition for these animals . "
The locals were indispensable in pass the squad to these one - of - a - sort rock and roll munchers , but the find would not have been possible had they not been alerted to the existence of the creature ground on the drive of an expedition by theMuseum d’Histoire Naturellein Paris , led by Philippe Bouchet . The study , published in the journalProceedings of the Royal Society B , was part of a tumid projection under the Philippine Mollusk Symbiont ( PMS ) International Cooperative Biodiversity Group ( ICBG ) .
" The intent of this radical is to discover new biodiversity and endeavor to discover drug from that biodiversity , " sound out Shipway . " So when we find something like this , it ’s like Christmas . "
