Within hours after the eggs are laid, the embryos become free swimming. The larvae will navigate around, searching opportunistically for some minuscule opening in a piece of wood: "the hull of a vessel or boat, a harbourpile, a shippingstage, a floating tree or the roots of one growing on the banks of an estuarine river, a piece of bark timber, a fisherman's cork, a cocoanut, a bamboo rod, a walkingstick, a beacon or buoy, a mast, rudder, oar, plank, cask, hencoop, or other ligneous waif or stray of the ocean" (Jeffreys). The fry have a few hours, or at most a few days, in which to infiltrate their host medium. Once successfully inside, however, they can snuggle in and begin their burrow. Scraping diligently in a path that follows along the grain of the wood, they grow very rapidly, outstripping their shells and acquiring their look of waving asparagus. When they meet a knot in the grain, they often curve around it, though some will burrow straight through. They will literally eat themselves out of house and home. But a lucky shipworm, encountering sufficient food supply and no impediments, can grow indefinitely, attaining a size of two feet or more. Dr. Ruth Turner found one in the tropics that was three feet long, which borders on seamonster dimensions. Once a shipworm claims a home, it is stuck there for the rest of its life. Efforts to transplant healthy, intact specimens from one plank to another have all resulted in fatality. They are loyal to their habitat; give them that. You may think of the shipworm inching forward, carving its burrow like a crawling prisoner who digs an underground tunnel with a spoon; or a blind man tapping alone in the wooden dark. The main diet of the shipworm appears to be plankton and other minute organisms. It remains unknown whether the shipworm actually Cats '"be wood particles it shreds, or merely processes it into a pulpy sub ce If the latter, you have to wonder why it expends so much energy 136 THE WEST SIDE on a task from which it does not specifically benefit. Eating wood is sim ply its mission, its fate, unquestioned, just as the scholar burrows through libraries, or the writer spends years piling up texts, secreting the unawaited vellum like a series of outer walls between the world and himself. It would be a lovely revenge to eat "this villainous animal," as Massuet calls it, even introduce it as a delicacy at the Oyster Bar. Customers might be invited to select their own bunch at a wharf where shipworms are particularly plentiful and bring them to their favorite restaurant, for Tournedos de teredo. The celebrated Redi found it very eatable, excelling all shellfish with its exquisite flavor. But Jeffreys thought the smell of a fresh shipworm nauseating. In trying to assess what conceivable utility the shipworm might possess, he concluded dourly, "Perhaps it is one of the creatures made not so much for our use as for our punishment.