Shuck, shuck, you got it?
Social media users were shocked by an “alien” creature that washed ashore in Australia with some calling it the “weirdest thing” they had ever seen.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before!” sea life explorer Vicki Evans wrote in a post with a photo on a community Facebook page. “Nature never ceases to amaze!”
The landslide happened along the dreaded ravine while I was hiking along Horseshoe Bay in Port Elliott, South Australia, The Advertiser reported.
Evans included photos of the oceanic oddity, which is long and filled with gelatinous tentacles that are covered in shells, like sea beads with hair braids.
Many Facebook users were equally amazed by the vermicelli-shaped tentacles, with one writing: “This might be the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen!”
“Wow, looks long judging by the size of a dog,” said one, referring to a curious dog seen inspecting the creature in the photo.
As it turns out, the “aliens” were actually goose barnacles, a common crustacean species that clings to floating objects, piers and piers, or even washed ashore, as was the case with the colony in question.
University of South Australia marine ecologist Dr. Zoe Doubleday said she was surprised by the scale of the pileup, which she suspected “took the mother ship apart” and washed ashore.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, and it just has to be an old pier from a pier or some piece of marine infrastructure that’s been in the water for so long to grow a dense cluster of barnacles.” said the scientist. “It’s been there for a long time.”
Despite resembling oysters and clams, the ocean dweller is more closely related to lobsters and crabs, Doubleday says.
They even put tiny webbed shrimp-like legs inside their shell, using those appendages to filter plankton and other food from the water.
Like their claw-bearing brethren, gooseberries are considered a delicacy, especially in Portugal and Spain, where they are called Percepts and served with melted butter.
“To eat a percebeca, grasp the shell, tear off the skin covering its neck, and be aware that you are sitting in a splash zone,” Atlas Obscura instructs. “Every time you unwrap a gooseneck barnacle, expect a gush of brine.”
They’ve even been featured at wild game hotspot Foxface Natural in New York’s East Village.
But be prepared to pay a pretty penny.
These filter feeders are actually among the most expensive seafood on earth, fetching up to $125 per pound – you got that lays a golden egg, if you will.
In 2020, beachgoers discovered a group of sharp-edged crustaceans in Wales that they said were valued at around $65,000.
Their special name, meanwhile, comes from a notion among medieval naturalists that barnacles were actually goose eggs.
When the donkeys were ready to hatch, these sea urchins would drop from their rocky bed and the young birds would rise from the sea.
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Image Source : nypost.com