Barnacle: Life Cycle was this weekend’s manic stop-frame bid to escape human affairs (and homesickness for the barnacle-encrusted inlets and outcroppings of Victoria BC). I’ve always loved watching barnacles sipping the sea, but I didn’t really think about them as creatures until listening to researchers talk about them on various episodes of the CBC’s fab science programme Quirks and Quarks (a segment on barnacle penis size - largest in the animal kingdom - many years ago stands out in my memory but there have been others since). Barnacles might seem a bit marginal, uninteresting, hard to love, and maybe they are. But hey, Charles Darwin spent a decade, pre-Origin of Species, studying and writing about uniformity and variety amongst barnacles, demonstrating (amongst other things) that they are arthropods, like lobsters and lice (rather than molluscs). Rebecca Stott’s wonderful Darwin and the Barnacle (20030) tells this story.

I hope I haven’t mangled the barnacle’s almost unbelievably complicated life cycle too badly in this; of the sources I relied on, the Linnean Society’s A-level module Brilliant Barnacles was especially inspiring (and a master class in combining science, history, images): https://www.linnean.org/learning/cont...​.

I’m grateful to my friend Lydia for suggesting Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals: XII. Fossils (R.125) to accompany this sketch of the barnacle’s amazing, multiply-metamorphic life cycle (LSO’s 2005 recording).

Barnacles were here before us; they will outlast us. And however ordinary, they are also completely extraordinary..