Sunday, March 29, 2009

Feeding the Barnacles

Overdue posts again.
Barnacles are those marine organisms that you find them permanently encrusted on ships, poles on the sea (for example at fishery places, you can see those poles by the beach are stacked with barnacles), or even on shells of turtles, crabs and snails!

Poles like these

A crab in the exhibition with barnacles on its shell (note the barnacles in the red circle).
The water in the small fish tank is very dirty because everyone has been feeding them non-stop for the past 2 days.

The truth is, the crabs looked like this on the ship prior to being sold to consumers like us. This is what the fishermen see after getting their catch. What they would do is to scrub these 'I-will-never-leave' immigrants before selling to us. The barnacles can also live in the shells!

Surprisingly, some people even eat it and treat it as a delicacy!
One of the preserved barnacles exhibited

At times, it's a nuisance because they often attach themselves to man-made structures, and attaching themselves to the base of the ships can cause the ship to be even heavier- which means more energy need to divert the ships and consequently, higher fuel consumptions.

This is how barnacles feed on.



We fed them with this.
It costs SGD $25.00 per bottle.

2 comments:

Q said...

since barnacles r nuisance, y need to feed them?

SN said...

hehe.. coz u can then see how they wave and eat the food that we fed it on :)