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These infamous clams are invading new areas, buoyed by climate change and the 2011 tsunami in Japan. //
Since some of the earliest recorded references to the creatures appeared in texts from Ancient Greece, the clams have hitched rides in the hulls of wooden boats and, later, in ballast water, settling in ports and harbors around the globe and devastating wooden infrastructure as they went. In fact, some species have become so ubiquitous, they’re cryptogenic—meaning it’s impossible to tell where they originated. Theirs, perhaps, is a liminal eighth continent, one built not of land, but of motion itself, its boundaries defined in part by the human quest for empire and commerce.
And these days, traveling shipworms may find that people have altered the ocean conditions in their favor with global climate change.