The last time people thought very seriously about shipworms—people other than shipworm scientists, that is—was likely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when wooden ships still reigned. A shipworm is in fact not a worm but a clam that looks like a worm and eats wood. The hinged shell of the typical bivalve has been reduced, in the shipworm, to a tiny pair of scrapers at the front end, which the animal uses for burrowing, like the tunnel-boring machines grinding away under Manhattan’s Second Avenue to extend the new subway line. 查看全文>>