(soothing music)
- My name is Reuben Shipway
and I'm from Ocean Genome Legacy
which is part of
Northeastern University
Marine Science Center.
The reason we are here today
is because we have found
quite an extraordinary new species.
- [Dan] This one is so unusual
that we actually had
to create a new genus,
which is sort of the next
level up in taxonomy.
We've given this a name,
it's called Lithoredo abatanica.
And it's named for Lithoredo
because the family is toredo,
litho stands for stone,
so it's litho-toredo.
And abatanica, 'cause we found it
in the Abatan River, in the Philippines.
This particular species is found only
in a stretch of this
river in the Philippines
that runs about three to five kilometers.
That's it, the only place in the world.
- [Reuben] See there's a big animal
just in here right now.
(hammer pounding)
This really cool.
Piece of stone has just split.
(Reuben laughs)
You can see it's living inside
this big piece of stone.
- [Dan] This one is exciting
because it's a clam,
a bivalve, it looks like a worm
and it burrows in stone.
But this one's unusual because
it's not only burrowing in the stone,
it actually eats the stone.
We look inside the digestive
system of the animal,
we find the same stone
in the digestive system
that they're burrowing in
and they're sort of excreting, like sand.
- [Reuben] So we've got the bivalve shell
just up this end,
and then down this end
we've got the siphon,
so it breathes and excretes
through these siphons.
And then these hard calcareous structures
either side of the siphons,
they're called palates.
Those are structures that
are unique to the family
and what they essentially do is they
close off the burrow that
the animal is living in.
- What's most remarkable about this
is what we don't know, I think.
The rock has no nutrients
so there's nothing much in there
that this animal could live on.
So that tells us it's
doing something else.
And what that something else is,
should be very interesting.
(low rumble sound)
