Damages Harbours.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20374, 3 July 1934, Page 6

Damages Harbours.

Nature Notes,

By

James Drummond,

F.L.S.. F.Z.S.

T HE WORMLIKE BODY of the shipworm, which greatly worries harbour engineers in the North Island, is an excuse for its popular name. Nobody has suggested that the name should be changed, but the shipworm is no worm. In scientific publications it is called teredo, and is placed in its proper position in the same group as the mussel, the oyster, the cockle and other molluscs with bivalve shells. Its shell is a strange and complicated little contraption, different from the shells of other bivalves, but so important to the shipworm that without the shell it would perish.

The Otago Harbour Board has no trouble with the shipworm; the Lyttelton Harbour Board has very little; the Wellington Board finds it troublesome; in Auckland Harbour it is very troublesome. This at first glance seems to support an opinion held by Mr C. H Clibborn, secretary of the Lyttelton Harbour Board, that the shipworm likes warm waters, and finds the water south of Cook Strait too cold; but at least one species in New Zealand, Teredo ncrvegica, is found in the waters of the British Isles and ranges into icy waters in the Arctic Circle.

The shipworm made its greatest mark on human handiwork 204 years ago, in the Zuyder Zee. For reasons not understood it suddenly increased there It became so plentiful that, threatening the timber works of the dykes in Holland, it almost brought disaster on the whole Dutch nation. The danger stirred Dutch naturalists to study this tiresome mollusc. Three years later its literature began with a learned treatise in Dutch by Godfrey Sellius. Reports, papers, memoirs and monographs have been written on its structure, its life history and its habits. About thirty species are known, all tireless borers. Linnaeas named the common European species Calamitas navium, the shipping calamity. Bearing its Latin name. Teredo navalis, it still confronts the Dutch. t