Amazing read and excellent photos: > Two years later, Killingley had worked with Scripps biologist William Newman (affectionately known to colleagues as Barnac

Amazing read and excellent photos: > Two years later, Killingley had worked with Scripps biologist William Newman (affectionately known to colleagues as Barnacle Bill) to come up with the e = mc2 of barnacle biochemistry: an equation that relates the ratio of oxygen isotopes in a shell layer to the temperature and composition of the water it grew in. Because different parts of the ocean have unique temperature and salinity profiles, explains Taylor, measuring these isotopes could theoretically allow you to figure out roughly where in the ocean each layer had formed. “The basic idea is that there are these chemical tracers in the environment,” he says. “The barnacle puts some of those tracers in its shell and thereby keeps a kind of growing record of places that it’s been.” I used to really dislike barnacles every time I saw a whale photo with them - never imagined that they are implicitly collecting metrics in their shell.