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Gooseneck Barnacle — printable fact sheet
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Gooseneck Barnacle
Pollicipes pollicipes
Gooseneck barnacles (Pollicipes and Lepas) are crustaceans that spend their adult lives cemented head-down to rock or driftwood, kicking feathery legs called cirri through the water to comb out plankton - Thomas Huxley's description of a barnacle as an animal standing on its hea…
Did you know?
- Harvesting gooseneck barnacles is considered one of the most dangerous professions due to the treacherous, wave-battered rocks where they grow.
- Charles Darwin spent eight years - from 1846 to 1854 - dissecting and monographing barnacles before publishing on evolution, and it was barnacles that taught him how much variation exists within a species. Spanish percebes from exposed Galician headlands sell for far more than sheltered ones because wave-battered rock produces shorter, fatter, better-tasting stalks. Lepas species raft across oceans on flotsam and are among the first colonisers of any floating debris, including plastic and, notoriously, tsunami wreckage.
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