Little and brown, exciting, don’t you think? Well, I think so, but then I’ve been known to just pick up something messy and examine it for days. When I land a shore boat near a rocky headland for some intertidal exploring, one of the most common animals I find there are “little brown barnacles” – yes, that the real name. These are tiny creatures, about the size of your little finger nail, live just a few years and will never get any bigger. That’s it, tiny, and they’re so numerous you really can’t take a step without crushing a few! But with barnacles, there is safety in numbers, and in some places, 8,000 of them have been counted in one square foot – a mass of animal life so tightly packed together they appear as a crusty brown carpet.

The lowly little brown barnacle is worth a closer look – really. Here in the Salish Sea, there are many other and larger types of barnacle, and even one specific to living attached to humpback whales. All are larger than the little brown and the larger ones were consumed by original Tribal people for thousands of years. There are several that outwardly look exactly like our barnacle “star this month”, and all are filter feeders living in shell homes of their own making. How do they reproduce? Well, to start with each barnacle is both sexes and each has a reproductive organ that can extend 20 times their own length to ‘connect’ with its closest neighbor. Maybe too graphic to imagine, but then I told you this little brown was exciting. Next time you’re on the rocks (you, not the boat), stay off those little browns when you poke around tide pools. Please!

Larry Eifert paints and sails the Pacific Northwest from Port Townsend. His large-scale murals can be seen in many national parks across America, and at larryeifert.com.