This post is part of a series about “uncharismatic” species in environmental history, emerging from a workshop at Universität Augsburg in September 2026.

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In the early weeks of my stay in Munich, a fellow Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg global dis:connect took me on an adventure through the city’s Altstadt to showcase the arts and crafts shops she had found. Having already admired the realms of fabric and the outdoor courtyard, we wandered through the remaining cavernous rooms of Radspieler, a Munich institution since 1841. Here I stumbled upon an unexpected sight: far from the sea, shipworm tunnels etched into a chest of drawers.

It is an aphorism that you start to see your research subject everywhere, and so doubting myself, I searched for information bout this surprising appearance of shipworm, some 800 kilometres from the nearest port. Perplexed by my unusual inquiry, the shop attendants informed me the marks were made from ‘some sea creature in Venice lagoon.’ This confirmed my initial suspicions and sent me down a new wormhole too. How had the historically maligned, and now more often forgotten, shipworms made their mark on these drawers that cost nearly €6000?

Shipworm, or teredo, have lived alongside us in coast and ocean for millenia, though most of us have never seen one. They are species of bivalve molluscs from the Teredinidae family adapted to living within oceanic wood. Unlike their more well-known and valued counterparts such as the oyster, these species largely live outside their shells and use them to drill into the wood, creating an enclosed tunnel in which the long, soft, vermilion body of shipworm can safely exist. They grow almost totally encased within wood, leaving only tiny siphon holes as a clue to their presence within. While creating these homes, shipworm can also destroy them. If too many shipworms grow too large in parallel, the timber disintegrates. For some communities in Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific the mollusc was a valued food and medicine embedded in local knowledge of the coastal environment. Shipworm also play an important role in oceanic carbon cycling because not many species can turn wood into energy.¹

But it also could be a catastrophe if one’s ship went down with the shipworms.² While dead mangroves, fallen trees and driftwood long served the shipworm well, wooden vessels and wharves were a boon for the species. Shipworms found new ecosystems and opportunities to flourish alongside human travellers across the waves. In many historical contexts, the shipworm was thus hideous in appearance, invasive, a marine pest. Sailors and dockworkers sometimes reported what must have been the disconcerting, if not terrifying, sound of the shipworms’ rasps in the wood below their feet.³ Without suitable protection and regular replacement, ships and jetties could fall victim to the mollusk, sometimes without the seafarers’ prior knowledge of their impending demise.⁴ 

Across different periods and cultural contexts, humans sought to minimise the presence and impact of these wood borers. Wooden waka or sailing ships might be treated with shark oil, tar, a false bottom, or more recently copper to prevent shipworm larvae burrowing into and setting up within. Regular careening and cleaning helped to prevent biofouling and provided the chance to replace damaged planks.⁵ The age of European imperial expansion and maritime empires resulted in longer and more extensive oceanic voyaging. New oceanic forests in the forms of wharfs and jetties enabled shipworm to flourish, as there were often longer periods at sea before careening and repair of ships, especially across the Pacific.

What was most troubling about the shipworm during this period was its unknown presence. They remained hard to detect even for those venturing below the water to examine a wharf pile for infestation The difficulty in establishing whether or not shipworms were growing inside a specific wharf pile or ship plank meant that they were simultaneously ignored and feared. Furthermore, their ubiquity in a world of sail made them an uncharismatic presence: unseen and unwanted, an oceanic Schrödinger’s cat. Shipworms therefore draw us to the wider question of charisma beyond terrestrial settings, to the alien, underwater world. 

Jamie Lorimer’s foundational work on non-human charisma emphasises charisma could be both cuddly (driven by positive emotions) or feral, when the radical difference instead generates negative emotions.⁶ To this we can add absent charisma for species that elide the archive and thus the historian. Absent charisma, or what we might also call “uncharisma,” explicitly incorporates those species that don’t register an emotional response and that exist beneath our attention. We might conceptualise this as an overlapping tripartite division of cuddly, feral and absent charisma between which species can move, depending on their presence and visibility, and on the perceptions of them by different communities at different moments. Though shipworm were feared, they were also often forgotten.

Shipworm embody the intersection between feral or negative charisma, and absent charisma, and thus can help us unpack the tension and overlap between conflicting uses of these terms. Both everyday and scientific knowledge was uneven, reflecting the shifting spectrum between ignorance and anxiety. For example, the term “teredo” was commonly applied to a multitude of species, and many species were reidentified multiple times, suggesting the patchy knowledge and uneven spread of scientific understanding. The teredo’s own actions also contribute to the difficulty in making sense of the varied species and their relations: they sealed off their burrows with pallets if disturbed, and the small size of their boring shells compared to other bivalves made specimen identification challenging. What we now call Lyrodus pedicallus was identified as a “new” shipworm species twenty-one times in the Pacific and twelve times in the Atlantic.⁷ Their uncharismatic presence encapsulates the uncertain knowledge of shipworms’ existence historically, and the resultant challenge in researching them for environmental historians.

Building on Lorimer’s theory, Clayton Fordahl has recently advanced a relational and historically informed interpretation of animal charisma. He suggests two complementary models that might help us understand the shifting and contingent nature of un/charisma over time and place. First, charisma can emerge when the (animal) actor’s performance resonates emotionally with the (human) audiences’ experiences organically, a phenomenon borne of social interaction if shaped by structural conditions. Second, “reputational entrepreneurs,” often experts, serve as translators and intermediaries between actor and audience at crucial moments, shaping the interpretation and legitimacy of the former’s charisma.⁸ These models help us think about the different processes, places and moments where shipworm have either emerged as negatively charismatic, or burrowed into historical obscurity.

How does this apply to that shipworm-tunnelled chest of drawers? Shipworm are fashionable again, as long as they are not actually there. Compared to their uncharismatic presence in ships and wharfs, they are now charismatic only in their absence. The animal’s death enables the shipworm to be reimagined as an artistic co-creator, rather than a pest: wood is embellished by the industriousness of the marine teredini, in the words of one maker. There is both substantial interest in shipworm-eaten wood as a unique product and also a resurgence of creative and academic interest in thinking with these critters. This remaking of shipworm charisma reveals three important facets of analysing uncharismatic beings. 

First, the perceived charisma of a place influences the perception of the species within it. Venice has both an abundance of timber in the ocean, notably as briccole, or bundles of oak navigational posts, as well as a seductive reputation as a unique, beautiful and troubled tourist destination. Briccole must be regularly replaced as molluscs and tides wear away at the waterline. In recent decades, Venetian makers have repurposed shipworm-eaten briccole as furniture, guitars, and objets d’art. The holed briccole thus becomes a portable slide of a disappearing place, with man and mollusc together creating historical memory in wood. Shipworms in this guise are sold as ambassadors of a cultural landscape (or better seascape), rather than marine pests. The charisma of the Venetian lagoon aids in reimagining the shipworm as a charismatic critter. This example highlights the significance of the relationship between specific species and their wider landscape in analysing the shifting nature of more-than-human charisma, or lack thereof.

Second, reputational entrepreneurs are not only scientific or conservation experts, but might also be furniture makers, artists, or luthiers reinterpreting shipworm rasps as part of a unique process of creation as well as destruction. We might look beyond conversation scientists for other examples of how different knowledges and communities similarly rethink our perception of other species and their environments.

Third, renewed scholarly and artistic interest in teredo reflects in part the multi-species nature of current environmental crises, with marine borer a potential harbinger species of climate change impacts in the ocean.⁹ In the presence of multiple environmental crises, shipworm have renewed appeal as an underdog, resisting and even flourishing in spite of human attempts to erase their presence with us across oceans and along coasts. How we think with and tell stories about such “awkward creatures” is therefore important in reimagining our environmental relationships.¹⁰ These are stories of negative space, the holes left in wood and in our sources. Perhaps attention to absence can shift our histories of unknown and unloved species from the uncharismatic condescension of posterity to that of a more visible protagonist.

Visiting Venice, I found shipworms through their absence everywhere. As others looked up towards the arched windows and ornate domes around San Marco, my eyes searched the water line for the eroded wood of old mooring posts (paline) or signs of their recent replacement. My fingers traced the holes left in sfojo, briccole cross-sections now crafted and sold by venerated woodmakers, Lunardelli, from their atelier on Calle Seconda del Cristo. Shipworm continue to shape the lagoon, though so often uncharismatic and unnoticed. Perhaps we can learn something from the artists, and attend more closely these negative spaces.

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1. For example: Margaret Somerville and Tony Perkins, Singing the Coast (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2010), 117-20, 204.Stefanos Stravoravdis, J. Reuben Shipway, and Barry Goodell, ‘How Do Shipworms Eat Wood? Screening Shipworm Gill Symbiont Genomes for Lignin-Modifying Enzymes,’ Front. Microbiol. 12, article 66500 (2021). ↩︎
2. Sarah Gilman, ‘The Clam that Sank a Thousand Ships,’ Hakai Magazine, 5 December 2016, https://hakaimagazine.com/features/clam-sank-thousand-ships/ ↩︎
3. Kate Stevens, ‘Chewpoints across the Pacific Ocean: Marine borers and the disruption of colonial infrastructure’, Journal of Global History, online ahead of issue (2026): 14. ↩︎
4. For example: James Cook, entry for 9 November 1770, The Project Gutenberg EBook of Captain Cook’s Journal During the First Voyage Round the World, 1768-71 (2005), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8106/8106-h/8106-h.htm ↩︎
5. Randolph Cock, “‘The Finest Invention in the World’: The Royal Navy’s Early Trials of Copper Sheathing, 1708–1770,’ The Mariner’s Mirror 87, no. 4 (2001): 446-459. ↩︎
6. Jamie Lorimer, ‘Nonhuman Charisma,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 5 (2007): 911-932.
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7. Andrew N. Cohen and James T. Carlton, Nonindigenous Aquatic Species in a United States Estuary: A Case Study of the Biological Invasions of the San Francisco Bay and Delta, A Report for the US Fish and Wildlife Service (Washington DC, The National Sea Grant Program Connecticut Sea Grant, 1995), 62. ↩︎
8. Clayton Fordahl, ‘Beyond Animal Charisma,’ Conservation & Society 22, 1 (2024): 14-24. ↩︎
9. For example: Peter Paalvast, and Gerard van der Velde, ‘New threats of an old enemy: The distribution of the shipworm Teredo navalis L. (Bivalvia: Teredinidae) related to climate change in the Port of Rotterdam area, the Netherlands,’ Marine Pollution Bulletin 62, no. 8 (2011), 1822-1829; Davide Tagliapietra et al., ‘After a Century in the Mediterranean, the Warm-Water Shipworm Teredo Bartschi Invades the Lagoon of Venice (Italy),’ Biological invasions 23, no. 5 (2021): 1595–1618. ↩︎
10. Franklin Ginn, Uli Beisel, and Maan Barua; ‘Flourishing with Awkward Creatures: Togetherness, Vulnerability, Killing,’ Environmental Humanities 4, no 1 (2014): 113–123. ↩︎

Cover image: Briccole in Venice lagoon, Murano, October 2026. Author’s photo.