Shipwrecks and Global ‘Worming’

Abstract

Marine borers, particularly the shipworms, as destroyers of timber, par excellence, are well known from very ancient times. They attacked the wooden hulls of ships with such intensity that the weakened bottom planks broke up even due to a mild impact caused by hitting a rock or any floating objects inducing shipwrecks. Even the survival of sunken ships as wrecks depends on the mercy of wood-destroying organisms, which may turn these 'port-holes' to history into meaningless junks. The silent saboteurs, involved in several early shipwrecks, are the molluscan and crustacean borers, aided by bacteria and fungi.1. Chelura terebrans Philippi, 2.Tropichelura insulae (Calman), 3.Tropichelura gomezi Ortiz, and 4.Nippochelura brevicauda Shiino.

Deep Water Archaeology in Italy and in the Tyrrhenian Sea

“…The environment of the deep sea of the Mediterranean, as opposed to the Baltic sea and the anoxic waters (below 600 feet) of the Black Sea, is not so favourable to the conservation of organic material because the high temperatures are conducive to organic activity. Xylophaga is, of course, able to survive until about 200/300 m, where it is still able to attack wood, but some non-archaeological studies have hypothesized that it can live much deeper [10,11]. The observation of many deep shipwrecks suggests that Xylophaga can live also in deeper waters, since in the Mediterranean Sea it is very rare to find traces of archaeological wood not protected by sand.…”