(Newser)
– Never underestimate barnacles. According to researchers in Australia, they can only help track people lost at sea. Species of Anserifera lepas genus of barnacle goose are among the most common found in bio-encrustation, a fancy word for the accumulation of organisms on a surface, and “play an important role in bio-encrustation communities as basic species,” according to a study in Marine biology. To learn more, researchers at the University of New South Wales monitored how barnacles and other creatures fixed themselves on fixed and floating objects for six months. THE Lepas, which are attached only to floating objects, showed an average daily growth rate of 1.055 mm per day, which was above the fastest daily growth rate observed during previous research in the 1940s, and a faster daily growth rate of about 1.45 mm per day, for a launch. This is not as important as it may seem.
If a fisherman disappears and the wreckage of his boat reaches the beach, “we can measure and count Lepas (as well as counting the other amphipods, if present) to provide a minimal estimate of how long these wrecks have been adrift, “explains lead author Thomas Mesaglio. In addition, experts can” reconstruct the sea surface temperature they experienced while were trapped in the wreckage “performing an isotopic analysis of barnacle bark. The researchers say this could be used to trace possible drift patterns. All of this is hypothetical. However, coauthor Iain Suthers says the calculations suggest that the 36 mm Lepas found in the wreckage of the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 that hit the coast of Madagascar 16 months after the disappearance of the commercial plane in 2014 “were much younger than imagined” and probably formed “nowhere near the crash site” . (Read more stories of discoveries.)