What Lurks in a Drowned Forest in Alabama?
The mussel in Dan Distel’s petri dish was barely larger than a grain of rice. As he watched, the golden, semi-translucent bivalve stretched out a long, pale foot and dragged its shell across the plastic. Distel, director of the Ocean Genome Legacy Center, a nonprofit that explores and preserves threatened sea species, was dissecting pieces of wood collected from the remnants of a Pleistocene forest 60 feet underwater off the coast of Alabama. The mussel had been nestled in a crumbling piece of ancient cypress.
Distel had been looking for shipworms—long, fleshy mollusks that eat wood. Nicknamed “the termites of the sea,” shipworms burrow into and devour wood with the help of an array of bacteria living in their gills. Distel and his colleagues are hoping those bacteria will yield potential new antibiotics and other pharmaceutical compounds. But his team is also documenting and preserving any other species that has taken up residence in the drowned forest. The little mussel itself may host symbiotic bacteria that could make useful compounds.
Distel had never seen
