Pollicipes pollicipes

Pollicipes pollicipes

The Pollicipes pollicipes is a species of barnacles in the class of Barnacles. The barnacles live as sessile filter feeders on the hard surfaces of rocks in the intertidal zone of the sea and floating debris.

Features

Like other barnacles consists Pollicipes pollicipes of a flexible muscular stalk, the peduncle, to which it is anchored to the solid substrate, and from the shell-shaped, enveloped by the bivalved carapace hull or " head ", the capitulum. The whitish gray capitulum of Pollicipes pollicipes has a triangular shape and is occupied to protect with a larger, with age increasing number of calcareous plates, with older animals up to over a hundred calcareous plates. The cancer has six pair of thin feather -like cirrus clouds, which is filtered plankton from seawater. The stem of Pollicipes pollicipes can be 10 cm long.

Like other barnacles is Pollicipes pollicipes hermaphrodite. The eggs are carried in the so-called Eisäckchen under the carapace. The hatching nauplius larvae leave the carapace of the mother and develop after a pelagic phase to cypris larvae. These are made using an in- head cement gland on a solid substrate fixed and metamorphose to the sessile adult animal.

Dissemination

Pollicipes pollicipes is native to the eastern Atlantic. Along the coasts of France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco and the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands, south to Senegal and north sporadically to the coast of England In the Mediterranean, there are only scattered occurrences. She lives in the intertidal zone on rocks, floating debris and ship wrecks.

Use by humans

The stem of the barnacles is - eaten in boiled salt water as sea - fruit. The harvest is complicated and dangerous as the barnacles only in the hard to reach intertidal zones, ie are locate in the area, reflected in the constant waves against the rock. The wilder, the sea and the unprotected exposed him rock wall, the thicker and meatier, and correspondingly more expensive be found there barnacles. Customers in Spain and Portugal to pay the € 150 - € 200/kg for the so-called Percebes. The risky occupation of their fisherman who percebeiros, is the subject of literature, films and reports. In Galicia, on Spain's Atlantic coast, there are different places every year Percebes hard.

Mythology

As we previously knew nothing about bird migration, it was thought that Barnacle Geese (Branta leucopsis ) developed from this cancer, there has never been observed to nest in temperate Europe. The confusion was caused by the similarities in color and in shape. In German was even a duck from the goose. Because they were often found on driftwood, it was assumed that the barnacles were placed on the branches of trees before they fell into the water. The Welsh monk Giraldus Cambrensis claimed in the 12th century even to have seen developed from barnacles barnacle geese.