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– Never underestimate pickups. According to researchers in Australia, they may just help locate people who are lost at sea. Type of the Lepas considered genus of goose barracks is one of the most common in bio-contamination, a buzzword for the build-up of organisms on a surface, and ‘plays an important role in bio-populating communities as a foundation species’, according to a study in Marine biology. To find out more, researchers at the University of New South Wales monitored how the fairgrounds and other creatures were attached to floating and solid objects over six months. The Lepas, attached only to floating objects, showed an average daily growth rate of 1,055mm per day, which was above the fastest daily growth rate observed during earlier research in the 1940s, and a fastest daily growth rate of about 1.45mm per day, per release. It’s not as unimportant as it may sound.
If a fisherman goes missing and flushes debris from his boat ashore, we can measure and count Lepas (as well as counting the other amphipods if present) to give a minimum estimate of how long the debris has drifted away, “explains lead author Thomas Mesaglio. What’s more, experts can ‘reconstruct the sea surface temperature they experience while they were attached to the rubble ‘by doing an isotopic analysis of the shells. Researchers say it could be used to draw out possible drift patterns. All of this is hypothetical. However, co-author Iain Suthers says the calculations indicate the 36 mm Lepas found on the rubble of the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 that washed ashore off the coast of Madagascar, 16 months after the plane disappeared in 2014, ‘was much younger than previously realized’ and probably ‘nowhere near the crash scene ‘formed. (Read more discovery stories.)