A Shipworm's Diet

This shipworm, a marine clam, hosts bacteria that allow the animal manufacture food from the nitrogen found in dissolved air. The ability to grab nitrogen out of their environment and convert it into food is a skill that biologists had thought only plants had mastered. Recently, researchers at Ocean Genome Legacy in Ipswich, Mass., and their colleagues at Harvard Medical School have shown that shipworms have this ability.

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Image credit: Ruth Turner, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology