Curious Kids

Our new friend, the amazing wood-eating water worm March 11, 2010

Today, most of the energy that people use comes non-renewable sources.  Non-renewable means things that once they’re used up, they’re gone, like the gasoline fuel that we put into our cars.  Once we use up all the gasoline on planet Earth, there won’t be anymore! So we better find some other renewable sources of energy!

Renewable energy comes from things that you can use over and over and never run out, like wind and water. You can also use plants, because you can keep growing them over and over again. When we make a fuel from a plant, it is called a biofuel. Most biofuels are made of sugar, so the plants we use to make biofuels have a lot of sugar in them – plants like sugar cane and corn.

cute, aren't they?

Now let me introduce you to the gribble. A gribble is a tiny crustacean that lives in the oceans, like a crab or a lobster, but it’s much much smaller: it is about the size of a grain of rice. What makes gribbles amazing is that they can eat wood, by turning it into sugar in their stomachs.

For a long time many people didn’t like gribbles, because they would nibble away at their wooden boats and piers in the water.

But now some people are thinking differently. They think that the stomach of the gribble might hold an important secret. Since the gribble can turn wood into sugar, and sugar can be made into biofuels, if we understand how the gribble’s stomach works, we could turn just about any plant into a biofuel. We could make lots more biofuels, and we could make them faster and better, and maybe someday we would not need gasoline anymore!