Goose Barnacles, Barnacle Geese

Goose barnacles, Lepas anatifera (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

20 February 2021

Goose barnacles often attach themselves to old wood and float from tropical seas to northern shores including the shores of Britain. The barnacles pictured here and in the video below are Lepas anatifera. Their bodies are supported by a long, flexible stalk (a peduncle) that resembles a goose neck. 

Goose barnacles and barnacle geese have similar names because people linked them to explain where the geese came from.

Every fall barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) migrate to Britain and the east coast of the North Sea where they spend the winter. Those in Britain arrive from their breeding grounds in Greenland.

Barnacle geese (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

In the Middle Ages people didn’t know that birds migrate so they worked to explain the sudden appearance of full grown geese that they never saw nesting. Their explanation was that goose barnacles floated to shore, took root, and produced a tree that produced barnacle geese. This notion persisted for hundreds of years, from at least the 12th to 16th centuries.

Barnacle Geese. Facsimile of an Engraving on Wood, from the “Cosmographie Universelle” of Munster, folio, Basle, 1552

Nowadays that story sounds silly but we shouldn’t be too smug. We still create stories to explain things we don’t understand and spread them quickly on the Internet. In the future our fantastical stories will sound silly, too. I can think of a few about the coronavirus.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *