Barnacles have Big Dick Energy
With a brief sidebar about male elephants, who have surprisingly strong Little Bitch Baby energy.
Let us consider the humble barnacle. It begins life as a tiny larvae, wriggling around in the ocean, adrift and lonesome, until, like a freshly married couple in their mid-30’s moving to the suburbs, it finds a neighborhood it likes and chooses to settle down. The little larvae “release an oily droplet to clear the water from surfaces before sticking down using a phosphoprotein adhesive” (aka, the strongest glue known to mankind) onto whatever solid surface (usually a rock, but the sides of a Navy ship1 will do) it has chosen as the site of its new home, and it begins to build. It pulls in oxygen and minerals from the water surrounding it, and excretes it as calcium, building armored plates that contain the soft fleshy parts of its body. Once it's built a fortress, it's now a full-grown barnacle, and it will live with its head stuck in one spot forever, shell walls comfortably ensconcing it, collecting food that drifts by using wee legs that poke out of the armored dome (barnacle legs are called "cirri," which is going to forever change my viewing experience of the television series The Witcher). The cirri wave in the current, snatching up food and bringing it back into the safety of the dome to be consumed. It's a good life, if you can find a decent spot to roost. And if you can avoid being consumed yourself, by predators such as gulls and carnivorous sea snails. We will come back to the carnivorous sea snails later. First, I wanna hit you with some hot barnacle facts (should this be my new opening line for Tinder?).
There are a lot of members in the barnacle family tree. Estimates place the total count at somewhere between 1,200 and 1,400. Technically, a barnacle is a crustacean (there are so many things on this earth that are cousins of the crab, way more than you’d think). Barnacles are fascinating to look at, unless you have trypophobia, in which case I recommend you do not seek out images of barnacles. The most common kind is the acorn barnacle, which has the distinction of having the longest penis of any creature on earth, relative to the size of the rest of its body. The average acorn barnacle is half an inch long, and their penises can be up to three inches long, making their dicks six times the size of their body. If a human had a dick six times as long as they were tall... you know what, best not to imagine.2
For an acorn barnacle, waving around a dick multiple times longer than it is tall is normal Wednesday behavior. There is a biological reason why their penises are so long: they're sessile, meaning, once a barnacle has stuck itself onto something, it can no longer move. So, how to mate? Well! “Grow a very long dick” is the solution evolution chose for the acorn barnacle. These BDE ambassadors are hermaphrodites, but they can't self-fertilize, so they still need some one else's spunk to reproduce. They need to be fertilized internally, so they send the dick out and about, reaching inside the calcium plates of their neighbors in order to fuck. (Imagine if your only sexual encounter options were restricted to your next door neighbors and nobody else! For the entirety of your life! Which, for an acorn barnacle, can be anywhere from 8 to 20 years.)
The most fun thing about a barnacle dick, IMO, is that it dissolves at the end of mating season. Imagine! If this brilliant life hack existed in other animals, maybe we wouldn't be dealing with an average of 300 humans killed per year by elephants. Bull elephants get hormonal surges and go into a period known as "musth," at which point, their testosterone levels surge up to 140 times than usual, and they go apeshit. An elephant in musth will attack and try to kill basically anything that moves, including other elephants. This is a big problem on the Indian continent in particular. If you ever encounter a bull elephant and have cause to wonder if they're experiencing musth, a telltale sign is the secretions that run down the sides of their face from glands in their head. However, if you are close enough to spot the gland secretions, you are probably about to get …mushed. Best to try to avoid the experience altogether.
Back to carnivorous sea snails: they love nothing more than to eat a barnacle. Actually, it's possible they love other things more, but it's difficult to interview a carnivorous sea snail to find out what they like to do with their time, or if they even have a concept of "time" at all. This is why I think the smartest barnacle on the family tree is the whale barnacle. They have an amazing gig: no predators! They achieve this by spending their entire life latched onto a whale, and it's not like whales are cruising slow enough for a carnivorous sea snail to hop on. Ergo, no predation risks, and with all the miles a whale travels in a year, the barnacles cruising along for free on its back are going to get so much food flung into their faces, they’ll hardly have to wave their cirri around at all. Talk about an easy life!
The hardest part about being a whale barnacle is becoming one. An acorn barnacle larvae has a pretty good chance of coming across a rock as it drifts along in the current. Your chances as a nauplius (the first stage of a barnacle larvae’s life, when it’s still swimming) of running into a whale in the ocean are, perhaps, a bit dicier, considering how many more rocks there are in the ocean than whales.
Whale barnacle babies are typically released around whale nursery or breeding grounds, where whales hang out during specific seasons of the year. Nobody knows how the whale barnacles (I’m tired of typing out “barnacle” so I’ll be referring to them as “W.B.’s” from here on out) know when it’s time for them to release their larvae - they don’t have eyes, so how do they know when the whales are at any given moment? Some theories are that the W.B.’s can sense a pheromone emitted by the whales. Or maybe they can just tell because the water’s warmer. Who can say? If only we could learn to speak barnacle!
So, anyway, the hardest part about getting the cushy setup of a W.B. is having the luck to land on a whale. Once you hit that sweet blubbery runway, all you need to do is morph into a cyprid (second larval stage, where it grows a little foot and starts exploring to pick the perfect spot), find a desirable location on the whale host, and then boom, baby, you’re building a calcium castle where you’ll be set for life. All you gotta do in exchange is provide an easy resting place for whale lice, which eat the dead skin around whale wounds, and you’re golden! No rent, the food gets delivered right to your door, and no worries. The one downside I can see to being a W.B as opposed to a B. of the acorn variety is that W.B.’s are estimated to live 1-3 years, although nobody really knows for sure since it’s very difficult to find living specimens of whale barnacle for study (it’s basically only happened once, and the W.B.’s died very shortly after being taken into custody. They cannot seal themselves shut the way other barnacle species can, so they die pretty quickly once removed from water. And that’s if you can even find a dead whale to take them off of shortly after the whale’s been beached!). But I might take a shorter lifespan in exchange for never having to worry about being sucked out of my house straight into an aquatic snail’s digestive system.
The coolest thing about a whale barnacle, to me, is how important they could be to our understanding of the future effects of climate change; specifically, they might be the key to understanding what happens to the ocean food supply when the water starts to warm. W.B. fossils are being used to study historical whale migration patterns. Scientists date the age of the fossil, then look at the distribution of different isotropes in the calcium growth plate (think how tree rings sorta tell time) to see where the whale was in the ocean when the barnacle was growing at that stage. Theoretically, whale barnacle fossils could tell us about the distribution of plankton in the time period that W.B. was alive, which can then be cross-correlated to the time that whale was alive, and the state of the general climate during that time, and could then be used to predict the changes in the ocean ecosystem that might occur as the oceans warm again. Some amazing barnacle nerds are working on it. And if they succeed, it could be pretty important in the grand scheme of things, because plankton are the basis for the entire oceanic foodchain, and whales eat plankton, so if you follow the historical whales, you follow the historical plankton, and whale fossils are very difficult to find since they usually drop down at the bottom of the ocean, but their barnacle buddies often get scraped off on the sand in shallow waters in their breeding grounds, so it’s easier to find a W.B. fossil, and I am running out of breath, mentally, from being so excited to tell you all about this!
I will leave you with a scattering of fun facts that I didn’t have time to work into this essay extoling the importance of our calcium-encrusted pals, the coronulidae. I hope that you think about the modest whale barnacle from time to time, and let it remind you that even the littlest things can still make a big impact. (Actually, W.B.’s are much larger than their acorn cousins - they can grow as big as a clementine! But you get my point.)
Not all whales carry them - it's only about a dozen whale species. Nobody knows why this is the case.
Some W.B.'s have chambers in between their wall plates that allow the whale skin to grow into the inside of the barnacle! Or, allow the W.B. to grow around the whale skin, I guess.
Individual whales have been observed having up to 1,000 lbs of whale barnacles on them (omg)
There are people working on creating a barnacle-proofing solution to apply to big ships, to avoid the barnacles suctioning on in the first place. To them I say, good luck, and may the barnacles win.
If you want to read more about W.B.’s, I heartily recommend this article, which goes into detail about the scientists who study them. I love barnacle nerds so much now!
The Navy has estimated that barnacles encrustations on the hulls of its cruisers can reduce speed by up to 40%, therefore requiring more fuel to be burned to get the ship moving. Barnacles: they're a drag, and they're weaponizing it against the military industrial complex. #heroes
If a human being had the same body-to-dick ratio as an acorn barnacle, they would have a dick over 30 feet long. The length of an average school bus is 35 feet. You may be imagining a person with a dick dragging a whole school-bus-length behind them now, and if you are, I'm sorry, but not sorry enough to not tell you this.