Plight of the Living Dead by Matt Simon

Author:Matt Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

Barnacles: The Sexual Deviants of the Sea

If it weren’t for Mr. Arthrobalanus, the biological sciences as we know them might not exist. Charles Darwin might not have had the courage to publish his society-shaking theory of evolution by natural selection. And it might have been that Darwin didn’t learn so much about barnacle penises.

Darwin met Mr. Arthrobalanus in Chile in 1835, during his famous voyage on the Beagle. And by “met” I mean collected, for Mr. Arthrobalanus was Darwin’s pet name for a barnacle he gathered on a shoreline in the Chonos Archipelago. He found the orange little thing not stuck to a rock like you might expect of a barnacle, but drilled into the shell of a Chilean abalone, actually a kind of snail. Strange goings-on for a barnacle, which Darwin called both a “singular little fellow” and an “illformed little monster” (at least he was consistent about its size).

Darwin returned to England and of course formulated his famous theory—and promptly stowed the manuscript in a drawer. He knew what his grand idea would do to science and society, and he agonized over it. Not helping matters was the fact that Darwin’s friend the botanist Joseph Hooker suggested in a letter that to theorize about species means getting to know species. Replied Darwin, “How painfully (to me) true is your remark that no one has hardly a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many.” Luckily, though, Darwin’s other friend—Mr. Arthrobalanus—appears to have been the kick in the pants he needed. The soon-to-be father of evolutionary theory set out on an epic quest to catalog barnacles (which are crustaceans, not mollusks like clams and mussels), dedicating eight years of his life to teasing the things apart under a microscope in his study. It became such an obsession that Darwin’s young son George, upon inspecting a neighbor’s home, reportedly inquired: “But where does he do his barnacles?” (George was a weird kid.)

As it would turn out, Mr. Arthrobalanus wasn’t a mister, but a female. And tucked inside Mr. Arthrobalanus were teeny-tiny males, mere bags of sperm with little other function—like the female strepsipterans, they had no mouth or intestines. What each male did have, though, was “an immensely elongated probosciformed [read: reminiscent of an elephant’s tusk] penis, coiled up and filling the rest of the inside of the sack down to the testis, which latter occupies the whole anterior, and generally lower end of the animal.” Meaning, the male barnacle consisted almost entirely of genitals, an accomplishment not lost on Darwin. “I should think that this organ could be extended by the animal to, perhaps, even the 100/1,000th of an inch—that is, to between eight and nine times its own entire length!” And not just to show off: With such a prodigious penis, the minuscule male could stretch to reach the female’s individual eggs, which about matched him in size. (Your “traditional” male barnacle on the shoreline will do the same, extending his penis to fertilize his neighbors.

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