Foul play

Blistering barnacles!

“FOR God’s sake and our country’s,” wrote an 18th-century captain in Britain’s navy to the Admiralty in Whitehall, “send copper bottomed ships to relieve the foul and crippled ones.” Copper sheathing, first deployed widely in the 1780s, kept fouling at bay by inhibiting the growth of barnacles, mussels, tube worms and shipworms (actually a type of clam). But even today, when copper has been replaced by modern antifouling paints and wooden hulls have given way to metal ones, ship-fouling is still a problem.

Dealing with it costs billions of dollars a year and often involves toxic chemicals whose use is being progressively restricted. How the larvae of befouling creatures choose where to settle is thus of great interest. A paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Nick Shikuma of San Diego State University and his colleagues sheds some light.

Dr Shikuma studies tubeworms. These shell-forming annelids have become model organisms for students of ship-fouling. Their research has already shown that tubeworm larvae like to…Continue reading
Source: Economist