Barnacles in tank?

[cdub]

I was in Key West last month and I purchased a softball sized piece of barnacle. Its been sitting in a bucket of water and nothing has appeared. I'm thinking about putting it in my tank, does anyone have experience/advice on this?

 

[cdub]

anyone?

 

[FutureInterest]

Sounds like an interesting piece. I'm not clear though if the barnacles are alive or dead or whether you even want live barnacles in your tank. If they're dead and that's what you wanted, I would recommend only that you make sure everything else in that chunk is dead. I'd rather add dry/clean/base rock than anything live to my reef tank for fear of unwanted hitchhikers or pests.

 

[george]

My granfather's dock used to have barnacles all over it. About dime-nickel sized. I've seen larger ones of 1"+ for sale a couple times. They're filter feeders, so sitting in a bucket is probably starving it.

 

[cdub]

yeah it is a dead piece that i have had in a freshwater bucket to make sure that nothing is still alive inside.

 

[george]

Make sure it's not lacquered.

 

[james s_]

I have several barnacle pieces as you describe in my tank.You should be fine,Ive even put live ones in the tank before,they lived quite awhile I was surprised.

 

[siege]

I don't think that the average marine tank (whose owner is attempting to keep a healthy balance and not over-feed invert food) has a high-enough water-flow to support barnacles for too terribly long. The water and environments they are found in tend to be very turbulent with extremely high-water flow at regular intervals in waters that tend to be very rich with phyto and what not (either in rich inter-tidal zones or on ship's hulls, at shallow depths where PAR is high, or on a whale, etc.) I can find a lot of info on the life-cycle of the barnacle, but not the life-span.

I did find out that they are hermaphroditic and able to change sex, as well as having the longest penis in relation to body-size of any other creature in the animal kingdom. Get two, and if you can feed them enough without fouling your water for everything else in the tank, chances are you'll soon have more than you want. Many can live in locations where they only get 4 or 5 hours of submersion a day... I'd really have to think that unless you give them their own tank, unless you get some kind of nifty reef barnacle, you'd run a good risk of the barnacles over-running your tnak, not to mention sucking all the calcium out of the water with which to build their shells.