A Clammy Glimpse Into The Philippines’ Climate, Culinary, And Medical Future
- Crystal Chow 周澄
- 15 minutes ago
- 19 min read
This story was originally published by The Contrapuntal.
It was once the ocean’s most feared saboteur — a blind, worm-like creature that silently devoured Christopher Columbus’s ships and gnawed through countless wooden waterfront structures across the Atlantic.
Now, this tiny wood-boring mollusc might hold an unexpected secret to saving our future. As the climate crisis, food scarcity, and health threats intensify globally, this odd-looking tropical creature may become our unlikely ally — offering not only healing and nourishment, but unseen insight into its ecological habitat and lessons in adaptation to a changing environment.
Earlier this year, I embarked on a probing trip to a small coastal area in Southeast Asia to see what this ancient wood-eater could offer us: about resilience, and the many ways life endures, adapts, and sustains others.
On a sweltering day in early June, as the monsoon season arrives in the Philippines, I board a narrow banca boat from the estuarine dock in Pola, a coastal town in Oriental Mindoro. The river, shimmering under the tropical sun, appears strikingly clear, with no visible trace of the massive oil spill that smothered these waters just two years earlier.
As we veer into a winding stretch flanked by dense green mats of mangroves, a group of children lounging on a bamboo raft near the riverbank waves cheerfully as we pass. Thereupon, my local guides, Marwin Layag and Roland Boncaras, cut the engine, and the boat glides forward in silence beneath a leafy canopy, with dappled light flickering overhead.
Boncaras dives beneath the surface and emerges moments later with two astonishingly large oysters, shells nearly the size of his face, coated in mud and barnacles. In 2024, the discovery of these giant oysters (locally called talaba) made Layag — an electrician by trade and now a GoPro-wielding vlogger — a small-town celebrity.
The two men in their early 40s have been frequenting these rugged coastal terrains since they were children. Two years ago, they began posting laid-back, unpolished videos of their subsistence lifestyle — spearfishing, foraging for seafood and wild fruits, and cooking — on a Facebook page aptly named Kabilas Vlogs, a playful nod to their sibling-like bond and the Tagalog word bilas, meaning brother-in-law.
Boncaras bends low by a mangrove trunk, deftly treading through its waterlogged tangle of roots. With a few measured blows of the bolo knife, he chips away the bark until the red-streaked wood reveals not shallow holes but deep, irregular tunnels — as if something has carved its way inside.
He carefully pries out a slimy, slug-like creature from the exposed trunk and places it onto my palms. I gape at its delicate, elongated body: soft, almost weightless, its skin translucent enough to reveal a light greyish-brown tint from within.
I had expected to see it writhe like every other worm that tends to trigger disgust. Instead, it lies still, the light glinting through its see-through body, a quiet, eerie beauty made visible only when torn from its hidden world.
Say hello to shipworms, or tamilok, as locals call them. Except they are not worms at all, but bivalve molluscs — distant cousins of the oysters my guides just pulled from the same riverbed.
These strange creatures emerged through an extraordinary evolutionary journey over millions of years. Their protective shells shrank into small, ridged scrapers at the front end, perfect for rasping and grinding through wood, or in rare cases, even soft rock. Their organs stretched into naked, worm-shaped forms, perfectly adapted for life inside narrow tunnels.
And what gives shipworms their namesake superpower to digest wood holds another kind of wonder for scientists — the potentially life-saving kind.
But for now, the only experiment underway here is a culinary one.
World’s “Grossest” Delicacy
“Ma’am, you want to taste?” Layag teases.
From the boat, the duo retrieves a large glass bottle of homemade dipping sauce — vinegar, chilli, ginger, and garlic. Boncaras pries the oysters open, slips out the shipworms’ innards, rinses them with bottled water, and lays them onto one of the shells, now serving as a makeshift plate.
My companion, Maria Mangahas, an anthropologist from the University of the Philippines, says she prefers the tamilok. And so do I. It has a rich, chewy texture, not unlike oysters, but with a faintly earthy, bitter edge.
For most tourists, eating tamilok seems to be more about spectacle than taste. Run a quick search of “tamilok” on the internet and you will find no shortage of headlines daring: “Would you eat this?” Others exclaim “Scariest Food!” — as if “scary” were just another word for unfamiliar or foreign. Today, in Puerto Princesa and Aklan, two of the country’s famed destinations, tamilok tasting is marketed as an “exotic” eco-tourist experience.
But for Layag and Boncaras, and for many others raised in mangrove communities across rural Philippines, shipworms are simply another staple catch, even purported to have various medicinal properties.
In Palawan and the Visayan islands in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Japanese anthropologist Takashi Tsuji documented folk songs that affectionately passed down from one generation to another. These verses recounted the harvesting of tamilok, the trees villagers sought them from, and pairing with coconut wine—traces of a life bound by the rhythm of the tides, trees, and tradition.
In Pola, the two men recall foraging for seafood with their parents as children. They were taught, for example, to steer clear of the lipata tree — E. agallocha, also known as the “Blinding Tree” — that contains a toxic white sap that can cause severe irritation and temporary blindness; shipworms found in its driftwood were off-limits. They also learned to cook fugu (puffer fish) in classic Filipino adobo style — without poisoning themselves.
And yet, through Mangahas, who translates for me on this occasion, they admit their children show little interest in roaming these backwater playgrounds with them, preferring instead to stay indoors, glued to their screens. What looks like a hint of wistfulness crosses their faces as they speak.
Taking Stock Of Biological Riches
Earlier that morning, at 6 a.m., I joined the research crew — a team of biologists, lab aides, and local student helpers — as they set off to survey two mangrove sites around Pola in search of shipworms. The first, tucked deep within the forest, is quieter, its roots densely entangled in thick, dark mud.
The second site, by contrast, lies nearer the estuary and the town road. Here, the signs of human activity are unmistakable: an excavator idles atop a mound of sand, and we pass an area of exposed roots and tender new sprouts — clear traces of recent logging.
Led by Maria Celia Malay, marine biologist at the University of the Philippines’ Marine Science Institute, the team carefully inspects driftwood and collects water and sediment samples as they thread through the mangroves. Lab technician Melfeb Chicote breaks down suspect driftwood, careful never to disturb living mangroves, into smaller pieces for extraction.
Nicknamed “The Shipworm Whisperer” by his crew for his uncanny knack for finding them, Chicote shows me how to search for the elusive borers by spotting barely visible pinholes peppering the driftwood. Sometimes, a tiny siphon peeks out; other times, all that remains is a chalky tube they secreted.
Shipworms are ecosystem engineers vital to mangrove health, Malay says. Few organisms can break down wood cellulose and lignin; bacteria and fungi do so, but extremely slowly. Shipworms speed up this process, recycling the nutrients locked in wood and making “the carbon rapidly available again for the rest of the ecosystem”.
Roughly 70 percent of mangrove wood passes through their guts, explains Reuben Shipway, an expert in wood-eating marine invertebrates. “The reason we don’t live in a world where the seas are just covered in floating wood is because of shipworms,” he says over a video call.
By creating intricate tunnel networks into the wood they inhabit, shipworms also provide refuge for a vast range of marine life at low tide when the heat is punishing, Shipway adds. These include fish, as well as other invertebrates — such as crabs and snails — specimens that Malay gathers from each site to help build a “baseline data inventory of species”.
“Imagine if there is an oil spill. You wouldn’t know what you lost,” Malay stresses. “We don’t have enough knowledge to just look and identify them, because no one has done that work [here] in Mindoro.”
Looking For Unicorns
To date, more than a dozen species of shipworms have been identified in the Philippines, each with unique biological quirks. In 2017, the discovery of Kuphus polythalamia — a black, mud-dwelling giant shipworm dubbed “the unicorn of molluscs” — sent researchers and the internet into a frenzy, as living specimens of the five-foot-long creature had managed to elude scientists for centuries, until one was finally found in a remote lagoon.
Just two years later, researchers described a new genus and species of freshwater shipworm, Lithoredo abatanica, found in Bohol. Unlike its wood-boring cousins, this one burrows into limestone — prompting a renowned urologist to joke: “Could this creature be used as a ‘litho-leecher’?”
“How old do they get? How big do they get? How long do they live? There are a lot of these questions that we just don’t know,” says Shipway, who was involved in both discoveries.
And more discoveries are likely on the horizon. Although taxonomic records of Philippine shipworms date back to the 1920s, most of the early research and specimens collected during the American colonial era were destroyed in the Second World War, Malay says. Only a tiny fraction, less than five percent, of two of the country’s largest library collections survived the Battle of Manila in 1945.
Advances in DNA sequencing are helping researchers fill in the gaps, too. “There are many more species than we thought back in the day,” Malay adds. “It’s like redoing it with better techniques.”
But first, the team needs these “voucher specimens” to study their anatomy and sequence for DNA. “Once we have a better idea of how many species there really are, what their specific habitat is, or what kind of wood they like, then, later, we can go back and maybe just count holes [they have left behind],” Malay says, reiterating the need to establish a baseline.
Back at the beach house, Chicote carefully extracts the prized specimens — a task requiring patience and precision. “They’re so fragile,” Malay explains. “We need the whole animal from head to the tip, ideally without damaging the body wall, or they’d start oozing stuff.”
Her aides then move quickly to photograph and dissect them under the microscope. Asked if she had ever eaten shipworm, Malay half-laughs. This kind of routine, she admits, has permanently dulled her appetite, much as repeatedly dissecting sea urchins early in her career ruined uni for her.
Biomedical Treasures
The dissected tissue samples are rushed upstairs to the “cold room”, where a guest bedroom is temporarily converted into a temperature-controlled lab space.
There, a team of microbiologists in scrubs begins the delicate task of isolating bacteria from the shipworms’ gills, preparing them for culturing and eventual DNA sequencing back at their home labs in Manila. Leading the charge is Lilibeth Salvador-Reyes, a natural products chemist on the hunt for new bioactive compounds from the sea.
For centuries, scientists’ interest in shipworms stemmed from the need to control the massive damage they inflicted on maritime activities across the Atlantic. That began to shift in 1983, when three American researchers successfully isolated and cultured the bacteria from shipworms.
These tiny microbes are no ordinary hitchhikers; in fact, it is the extraordinary symbiotic relationship they have evolved with their host that lies at the heart of Salvador-Reyes’ research.
The bacteria create digestive enzymes that turn wood molecules into sugars and supplement their host’s diet with nitrogen, Salvador-Reyes explains. They also have a way to protect their host by keeping other “unwanted” pathogens from the environment at bay. “They’re like partners in crime,” she says. Chief among them is Teredinibacter turnerae, a bacterial symbiont that produces antibiotics that block other microorganisms from colonising the shipworms.
Some of these compounds show remarkable biomedical potential. These include an anti-parasitic agent with early promise against malaria, and a fatty acid that can disrupt bacterial biofilms — sticky microbial communities that contribute to chronic, drug-resistant infections worldwide.
“It’s like a one-two punch,” she adds, describing how the symbiont defends the shipworms on two fronts: blocking biofilm formation and targeting the rogue bacteria floating in the open.
Salvador-Reyes previously worked with Shipway and others on a U.S. National Institutes of Health-funded collaboration focused on mollusc-associated bacteria that ended in 2020. Now, she says, “we’re trying to expand what we know about the biodiversity of shipworms in their symbionts by looking at different biogeographical regions in the Philippines.” As one of the world’s richest marine biodiversity havens, these untapped microbial treasures may offer clues to the next generation of life-saving medicine.
“We need new antibiotics to target multidrug-resistant bacteria,” Salvador-Reyes adds. “Those that haven’t been described either as a synthetic molecule or as a natural product.”
But even as shipworms hint at cures and new frontiers, their world is shrinking — making the quest to uncover their secrets ever more urgent.
Rivers Where Life Is Plentiful
The next morning, I follow the research crew inland. Soon, the ocean vanishes from view, replaced by the cacophony of rustling trees and the crow of roosters echoing through the countryside.
Our first stop is a wide river, its clear waters running calmly between lush, dense walls of banana trees and riverside shrubs. This time, we are accompanied by Layag and Brixtan Gusto, a local farmer and vlogger who runs a Facebook page called Gusto TV.
We are on the hunt for something “very unique” — the “stars”, as Malay calls them — suspected to be related to the rock-boring shipworms previously found in Bohol. It is Gusto’s viral video that drew the crew to Pola, she tells me.
Gusto wades into the shallow, murky green water towards a small mound of mud and grasses. He then hacks at its submerged edges while Layag, as usual, follows closely to film. Moments later, he returns to the bank carrying a clump of mud-caked, tubular casings, with a few shipworms poking from their hollow ends, their bodies gleaming milky-white.
Locally called ugaong to distinguish them from the mangrove-dwelling tamilok, these river shipworms appear plumper and less slender than their coastal cousins. Gusto and Layag insist they should be cooked, not eaten raw — not out of concern for freshwater parasites, but simply because they taste better that way.
After packing samples, we drive deeper inland to a rural village with little sign of modern investment, where Gusto has lived since moving from Manila during the pandemic.
He leads us down a narrow dirt path, past fields of brittle, withered stalks—once green paddies now wiped out by a rice disease —to a shaded, narrow stream snaking through the underbrush. Here, we are joined by a 59-year-old local farmer, Gusto’s neighbour. Ugaong, he says, is simply something plentiful that they can harvest year-round to stretch frugal family meals. Not everyone eats them, he shrugs, but some occasionally sell a cupful for 50 to 100 pesos (€0.75-1.5) during cockfights, the nation’s traditional rural pastime.
When Traditions Meet Gourmets Online
While social media has become a powerful tool for scientists to uncover new sites — and at times, new species — with locals serving as guides, researchers remain wary of the risks it poses to these fragile habitats.
Following his viral posting of giant oysters, Layag says his page has drawn attention from people looking to try out these freshly poached delicacies. As the only one in town who knows how to find them (or so he claims), he says he now receives regular orders from a Facebook user, whom he casually describes as Chinese, to collect a sack full of giant oysters along with a bottle of shipworms, that he then packs in an ice box wrapped in wet cloth and delivers by land to the capital.
Whether this is for personal consumption or resale, Layag doesn’t know, and doesn’t seem to mind. It’s just this “one client”, after all. When asked about the selling price, his tone shifts slightly; he won’t give a number, only saying it’s “big money”.
In a country where up to 78 percent of the population uses social media, who knows how many other buyers are lurking online?
Yet, no one I meet in Pola, not even the town’s municipal environment and natural resources officer, seems particularly concerned about the prospect of overharvesting, whether for food or online content.
Perhaps there is a certain observed wisdom to their nonchalance. Research shows that shipworms are resilient creatures that can adapt to environmental changes better than most marine animals: they can survive across wide ranges of temperatures and salinity, and a single female can release at least a million larvae several times per season, allowing populations to bounce back quickly after habitat disturbances.
In fact, as oceans warm, shipworms are even expanding into historically unsuitable waters, making them unlikely climate survivors in an otherwise struggling marine world.
Still, the threat looms large. Social media buzz, paired with the local government’s plans for boardwalks and eco-tourism activities like river cruises and kayaking, could bring a surge of visitors and curious eaters alike.
For Malay and her colleagues, it is all too common a story — local wildlife pushed to the brink by unchecked harvesting and development. “We need to get [the communities] on board,” says Malay, noting how biologists often lack these “people skills”.
Climate Adaptation Done Wrong
And survival in a warming world is about more than bouncing back. Shipworms may be resilient, but their story is also a warning: missteps in development can hollow out ecosystems we rely on and still barely understand — even when wrapped in the language of “disaster planning” or “climate adaptation”.
Shortly after record-breaking Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Visayas in 2013, renowned conservationist Jurgenne Primavera surveyed mangrove damage in Eastern Samar. She found natural mangroves, though battered, showed signs of recovery within months, while monoculture plantations were “totally damaged” with “no resilience.”
Now working with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) in the Philippines after retirement, Primavera explains over a video call that healthy, protected natural mangroves can withstand storms and adapt to rising seas if given space to migrate landward, a process called “managed retreat.” Plantations, however, are far more vulnerable.
The problem, she says, lies in decades of planting the wrong mangrove species along seafronts. Since the 1970s, Rhizophora has been favoured for its ease of planting, but it lacks regenerative tissue at the branch tips, so trunks broken by storms often kill the tree outright. Native species like Avicennia and Sonneratia, by contrast, have apical meristems that enable regrowth after typhoons, though they require months of nursery care. “But that’s okay,” she adds, “because when the storms come, they will survive.”
Yet outdated national protocols still push Rhizophora planting, tied to funding streams that local governments depend on. “The problem is the national government does not listen to the science from researchers,” Primavera says.
Much of the national budget earmarked for disaster risk reduction and management goes to seawalls and coastal roads that, ironically, often involve the clearing of the very mangroves meant to shield communities against storm surges.
A bill requiring 100-meter-wide coastal green belts, which she helped file after Haiyan, has languished in Congress for a decade. “Nothing’s happened to the bill,” she laments.
In Pola, Malay voices the same concern. Before joining the Marine Science Institute in Manila, she taught in Iloilo, where she witnessed local governments pave riverbanks with concrete and dredge channels for “flood control”. Projects like these imperil undocumented species. “We’re going to lose those kinds of habitats [if this happens],” she warns.
At 78, Primavera doesn’t mince words, pointing squarely at the Department of Public Works and Highways as the force behind these misguided schemes. “There’s plenty of money,” she says of this “very powerful department”. What she wants is simple: that every project first be examined by scientists for its ecological impacts.
Just weeks later, her words rang almost prophetic. In July, revelations that some US$2 billion in funds had vanished into corruption-riddled flood control projects over just two years ignited public outrage. By September, the scandal — dubbed “Floodgate” — has engulfed the country, sparking mass protests in Manila.
Even so, Salvador-Reyes remains hopeful. Partnership with local communities and officials, she says, can help “define what they have” in their ecosystems, and “realise what can be written and what can be done” to manage human impact. “Maybe these vloggers would hate us later. But I think we can strike a balance,” she muses. “At least, that’s my hope.”
The World’s Next-Gen Seafood?
While scientists race to unlock shipworms’ biomedical potential and protect their habitats, some are eyeing them in a more familiar role—as seafood, this time farmed like mussels or oysters rather than harvested from the wild.
Shipway and his collaborator, David Willer from the University of Cambridge, have published three studies on the potential of shipworms — rebranded as “naked clams” — as a sustainable, highly nutritious seafood alternative. In 2023, they founded the world’s first shipworm farm, based in the U.K.
Shipworms’ rapid growth and remarkable tolerance for varying environmental conditions make them ideal for aquaculture. They contain nearly twice as much vitamin B12 as blue mussels — just a small weekly portion meets the recommended intake — and are rich in healthy fats beneficial to our heart.
And because they can be grown in fully enclosed systems that run on waste wood, shipworms offer a promising, nutrient-dense source of protein with far lower environmental footprints than other conventional shellfish and meats. For small-scale farmers in the Philippines, however, venturing into naked clam aquaculture would mean grappling with a myriad of challenges, such as the lack of infrastructure investment, technical know-how, and institutional backing.
Now based in Saudi Arabia, where he works in marine conservation while continuing his research, Shipway is discreet about the start-up’s details due to intellectual property concerns. But he personally shares that he would like to try shipworms prepared breaded and deep-fried style, not unlike fish fingers.
The rebrand, Shipway argues, is essential. Naked clam is catchier, more “appetising” for everyday consumers, he explains. “Very few people are still going around the world on wooden sailing vessels anymore, so that’s an outdated term. And ‘worm’ is just completely incorrect; they’re bivalves.”
Why Naming Matters
Interestingly, this isn’t the first call to rename shipworms in hopes of swaying public perception of a creature long seen as a marine pest. But here, the motivation was less about marketing than about affirming long-held Indigenous traditions.
In a 2011 book titled Singing the Coast, Australian researcher Margaret Somerville and Aboriginal activist Tony Perkins documented the oral histories of the Gumbaynggirr people of New South Wales. They described how the community harvested shipworms — locally known as cobra, or “sea worms” — for food and medicine from fallen logs along the river. Cobra was a cultural food, partly, they noted, “because they are not eaten by white people.”
To catch cobra and share in the bounty of the river was to enter its “silent rhythm,” to “become one with the bubble on the surface of the water.” By the time of writing, though, access to the river had been restricted, cut off from the traditional homelands known as No Man’s Land and marked as private property. What was once a space of gathering and nourishment became, they wrote, “a place of loss and fond memories”.
Two years later, American biologist and writer Mary Gardner expanded on this work by tracing how early Western scientific views of shipworms were likely shaped by Christian strictures (that anything living “in the sea or a river” without “fins and scales” should be “hated”) and the colonial disdain for Indigenous foodways — biases that still echo today in how tamilok is branded online as the “scariest food”.
As a corrective, Gardner proposed renaming the Australian colloquial “sea worm” or “mangrove worms” as “burrowing clam” — not only for scientific accuracy but also as a gesture towards cultural diversity and environmental justice.
If shipworms were recognised not just as pests warranting control but as sources of biodiversity and a deeply storied subsistence food for Indigenous communities, Gardner wrote, “more than simply language changes”: It could help revitalise cultural ecological knowledge about how to care for our coastal environments and the species they sustain.
The Symbiotic Planet
Primavera knows that righting the wrong science begins with sharing knowledge, a lens through which local communities can see the value of protecting mangroves.
Through her work, she has helped establish two mangrove eco-parks in collaboration with local governments, including the Bakhawan Eco-park in Aklan, where shipworm tasting is part of the attraction. Her technical guidance spans everything from footwalk width and daily visitor caps to designing community-based mangrove rehabilitation.
These eco-parks are run by the community: entrance fees go to local hands, fishers become guides, and vendors serve meals to visitors. “There are all kinds of income that they can benefit from, if the mangrove is established as an eco-park,” says Primavera.
Healthy mangroves, she adds, can provide livelihoods both outside and inside the ecosystem, from tourism revenue to harvesting mud crabs and shellfish during low tide. The parks are not a cure-all, but they show how local knowledge, careful planning, and science can meet in the middle.
Similarly, Salvador-Reyes believes that simply communicating the biology of these remarkable species can inspire protection. After the discovery of the “unicorn” Kuphus, she says she noticed a shift in local communities’ attitudes. “You don’t have an appreciation of what’s around you until you know what is there,” she says. “I think we just have to be guided always by science.”
Malay, meanwhile, is pushing deeper into the unknown. She wants to better understand what already exists in their treasure trove by enlisting a wood specialist’s help while expanding her search to seagrass-boring shipworm species, which have been identified elsewhere across Asia.
From wood and limestone to mud and seagrass, shipworms have evolved to burrow into distinct substrates, each harbouring its own microbial community. Who knows what biomedical potential lies hidden in these symbionts? And that in the species we have yet to find?
In the end, studying shipworms remains invaluable even if it offers us no miracle cures. Their symbiotic partnerships — the way they function, adapt, and evolve — are windows into the fundamental workings of life on earth, and perhaps, into our own future within it.
“They’re one of the few animals where you can actually grow the bacteria outside of the body of the host,” notes Shipway. “So that’s just really fundamental for helping us understand symbiosis, which is a fundamental process of life.”
The shipworms are many things at once. They have carried different names — from maritime menace to indigenous delicacy to scientific marvel — yet none alone captures their multitude. How they might help mend our ecosystems — or sustain us — remains an open question.
This story was produced in collaboration with Maria Celia Malay and Maria Mangahas. In addition, Gizelle Batomalaque and Venes Carmelo Banquiles contributed to the field reporting.
