Japanese farmers have raised barnacles for fertilizer. In Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, shipwrecked sailors survive by eating barnacles, and Thor Heyerdahl and his crew enjoyed the barnacles beneath their raft Kon-Tiki on their voyage across the Pacific. Some of the starving sailors survived in part by eating stalked barnacles growing underneath their small boats. The most famous example is after a whale smashed up the whaleship Essex in 1820 in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Shipwrecked mariners are overjoyed to find barnacles to eat. For soups and chowders, chefs like to boil you up, especially your larger relatives that can grow almost as long as this sheet of paper or just as wide at their base. So we mustn’t be cross if she seems to crawl. Barnacles can clog the water pipes of engines and do other damage to ships. Even when you die, your shell stays glued tight to whatever surface it’s on. So, the ship needs more supplies, fuel, and expensive paint to keep off more of your friends.
This slows a vessel down, adding more time to a voyage. You and all your buddies collect in amazingly large numbers on the hulls of ships.
If you’re going to be a barnacle, I’ll be honest and tell you most mariners hate your guts (more your shells). In 1599, Richard Hakluyt wrote: “There stand certaine trees upon the shore of the Irish Sea, bearing fruit like a gourd, which…doe fall into the water, and become birds called Bernacles.” Today, stalked barnacles are also called goosenecks. For hundreds of years, naturalists believed that a type of tree existed that grew these birds. They thought these creatures looked like larval geese because of their long necks and wing-like ends with feathery cirri poking out. The story goes that medieval naturalists found logs washed ashore, covered with stalked barnacles. No one is certain of the origins for the word barnacle, but it seems the Barnacle Goose had the name first. Stalked barnacles are more common on floating objects out at sea. Acorns are the compact ones on rocks that look like tiny volcanoes stalked are the ones with soft stems and a shell casing at the tip. There are about 900 barnacle species, but the best-known kinds are acorn barnacles and stalked barnacles. When water flows by, you open the hatch of your shell and catch food with your skinny, hairy legs, called cirri. Rather stay put? Stick to a rock, a buoy, or a wharf piling.Īs a crustacean, your relatives are shrimps and lobsters. If you want to travel, choose a boat bottom, some whale skin, a turtle shell, or even a penguin’s foot. You’ll still live in water, at least most of the time, but to keep from drifting all over the place you’ve got to attach to something with a powerful, waterproof glue. You are fragile and squishy, so you need to build yourself a shell so you don’t get smushed or eaten. Born from an egg, you float around for a while as plankton, then you need to decide where to spend the rest of your life. If you want to be a barnacle, you’ve got to turn upside down and catch food with your feet.
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