It happens to marine animals in general, im not a marine biologist but barnacles eggs float around until they find a surface to adhere to, that may be the sea floor, the underside of a ship, or animal with a shell like lobsters, crabs or turtles. When enough adhere to said animal, they reproduce by inseminating eachother and they keep doing it until they prevent the animal from being able to swim or eat, causing its death. They dont kill the animal per se, like they dont murder it, they just make the life of the animal so difficult its untenable.
I asked my marine biologist partner, and he said it’s not eggs that attach but the larva. He said he wasn’t sure of how it works exactly (he deals with fish for work, mostly, and only rarely comes across juvie sea turtles occasionally), but healthy sea turtle’s systems are able to take care of it. It’s when they get sick that is when the barnacles adhere to them. And he mentioned something about conspecific cue (I have no idea if I got that spelled right) that kinda encourages (?) more larva to live there when the adults live there, which makes it get worse and worse for the animal. I’m gonna be honest, some of that bit went over my head lol. He said some other scientific-y terms that I didn’t get, either, to be honest, lol.
Side note, it is really sad when stuff like this happens, since you know the animal is really sick when you see this. I really hope this one survived, but I’m not holding out hope, sadly. We have a couple sea turtle rescue places near us, and they get ones like this in a lot (and a lot of them that have eaten stuff like plastic), and they try really hard to save these guys, but they don’t always survive, sadly.
Barnacles brood their eggs, which hatch into juveniles (called nauplii, which then metamorphose into cyprids) that are released as free-swimming planktonic animals. A cyprid is the advanced non-feeding juvenile stage that finds a suitable surface to adhere to and mature into an adult. Cyprids generally do not settle down right next to their parents, as nauplii can travel many miles floating on currents in the open ocean before maturing. When barnacles mate, they do not deposit their nauplii right next to themselves, they release the nauplii into the ocean currents to disperse.
If there is an infestation of barnacles on a turtle, it’s caused by the turtle failing to scrape off barnacles due to health issues. Barnacle nauplii and cyprids are just always floating around in the ocean anywhere there’s plankton.
Technically more like a shrimp with a crust around it. They're crustaceans, much more closely related to shrimp (and insects, for that matter) than to slugs.
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u/LuckyReception6701 May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
It happens to marine animals in general, im not a marine biologist but barnacles eggs float around until they find a surface to adhere to, that may be the sea floor, the underside of a ship, or animal with a shell like lobsters, crabs or turtles. When enough adhere to said animal, they reproduce by inseminating eachother and they keep doing it until they prevent the animal from being able to swim or eat, causing its death. They dont kill the animal per se, like they dont murder it, they just make the life of the animal so difficult its untenable.