Sea ducks. To the question of the mysterious snack Message about the sea duck

Barnacle

Description

Sea ducks are barnacles, also known as pollycypes, persebes, balanus, sea, sea acorns, sea tulips.

The body of these crustaceans resembles a strong shell up to 6 cm, which is why sea ducks can be mistakenly called mollusks. Young individuals are freely in the water column until they find a suitable shelter. To stick to underwater landforms, balanuses have a long, fleshy, tentacle-like leg. They nest in flocks that look like flower beds.

Spreading

Sea ducks are common animals that live in all the seas of the planet. Especially a lot of them in tropical, subtropical and warm temperate waters. Balyanuses lead an extremely inactive lifestyle: they attach themselves to stones, the bottoms of ships, even to sharks, whales and crabs. These unpretentious crustaceans feed on plankton, and in the absence of suitable food, they can do without it for about a month.

Industrial production of balanus is carried out in Morocco, Portugal, and Spain. Only large individuals reaching 20 cm in length are of value.

Preparation and consumption

Sea ducks, like other seafood, are eaten in many cuisines around the world. Usually they are baked, boiled, added to soups. They do this without removing the shell from the animal. The taste of sea ducks combine lobster meat and shrimp at the same time. When eating sea ducks raw, the keratinized end is separated from the base, and tender meat is sucked out of the core, pouring it with a mixture of vinegar and olive oil.

Interesting Facts

Due to the difficulty of catching, taste and dietary characteristics, balanuses are valued at about 400 euros per kilogram, which gives them the right to be called "sea truffles".

In honor of those who glorify the Spanish province of Galicia, percebes or peus de cabra (that's what sea ducks are called there), the Fiesta de Los Percebes holiday was invented.

Balyanuses are one of the main filter feeders sea ​​water, and their sharp-topped houses are the most common cause cuts bathing in the sea. The harm from these harmless crustaceans is also expressed in the weighting of ships and fishing nets. A way to deal with balanus, other than regular scraping, has not yet been discovered.

The adhesive substance, thanks to which the sea duck is securely attached to the bottoms of ships or stones, is still a mystery to researchers. Its properties are phenomenal, and the invention of a similar material would mean finding a means for fast and strong splicing of bones, a material used in dentistry, and for many other purposes.

Calorie sea duck

Calorie sea duck - about 80 kcal.

It's okay if you don't recognize the dish shown in the photo.

Me too for a long time wondered: WHAT is this?! Dragon claws, turtle legs or coral sprouts? Yes, and with elements of rock. In any case, judging by the appearance, it is something very solid. How is it eaten?
In the end, I overcame indecision and first bought "half a kilo of this here," and then I found out the answers to all the questions.

Meet this famous Galician delicacy - the intelligent mollusk percebes, also known as "sea truffle" or "sea duck". With a duck, he is related by a leathery leg similar to the neck and a hard "beak".

Mollusks live, clinging to a rock, in dense colonies, similar to mycelium. If you look closely, you can see a large mouth and gills in the beak. Feeds on plankton.

Persebes is considered the most expensive shellfish. Its high price is due, firstly, to a very limited habitat - only Northern Spain (Galicia, Asturias, Basque Country) and Morocco, and secondly, the danger of fishing.
The persebieros are engaged in the extraction of the mollusk. You can get to the rocks where sea ducks settle only at low tide, which is quite dangerous. Every year, 2-3 fishermen die when catching shellfish.
Due to the growing popularity of the delicacy, the shellfish colony on the coast of Spain began to decline rapidly. Therefore, persebes fishing is currently limited to 6 kilograms per fisherman per year.
The French tried to cultivate the mollusk artificially, like oysters, but nothing came of this venture.
Therefore, if you are not ready to pay 120 euros for a dish that will also spit you from head to toe while eating, it is better to taste sea ducks in Galicia. I bought mine in Auchan for 7 euros per kilo.

Shall we get to cooking? Preparing persebes is very simple - boiled in sea water. It is recommended to take water directly from the sea. And if the sea is not at hand, then you need 60 grams of sea salt per liter of water. And a couple of bay leaves.

Clams are poured into boiling water so that the water covers them entirely, and boiled for only a minute.

Then they are taken out and quickly eaten. Boiled persebes looks little different from raw.

The fact that the sea duck spits while eating is no joke. Cooled clams are not so tasty, but hot ones, when you try to open them, splash with thin streams of sea water. So far, it's hard for me to imagine how to eat persebes in a restaurant, but in Santiago this is a very popular dish.

Clams are surprisingly easy to clean - you need to grab the beak with two fingers and turn it to the side. Pretty soon, the process begins to resemble the husking of seeds.

To taste, I would compare sea ducks with mussels and - not even with shrimps, but with crayfish, only heavily salted. Eating persebes is delicious and interesting.
It is recommended to drink white wine or whiskey. But you already know about my addictions.

Enjoy your meal!

Add me to your friends

Sea ducks are barnacles that are the closest relatives of the sea acorn. Ducks, like acorns, have calcareous houses with a strong lid.

But the front parts of the head of sea ducks grow into a long stalk emerging from the hole in the lower part of the house. With the help of this stalk, the duck is attached to the sea substrate. The stalk in some species is covered with calcareous scales, as a result of which it becomes stronger and thicker.

Sea acorns, unlike other relatives, tend to change habitats. They are attached not to fixed objects, but to pieces of algae, pumice or wood floating in the water.

In such an interesting way, sea ducks travel through the expanses of the oceans. In addition, they can use fish, swimming crabs, sea ​​turtles and . Quite often, ducks attach themselves to their relatives - sea acorns that I travel on. Also, ducks can secrete a foamy float and, hanging under it, swim, both in groups and on their own.

Where do sea ducks live?

The habitat of tropical ducks is tropical waters, where they prey on siphonophores - "Portuguese boats" belonging to the class hydroid polyps. When the duck feels the approach of the Portuguese boat, she starts to quickly work with her legs, directing the raft towards the prey. For ducks, siphonophore stinging cells containing strong poison are not dangerous, since their bodies are protected by shells. Sea ducks thoroughly eat the victim, doing intensive work with their mandibles.

Sea ducks living off the coast of Africa behave even more interestingly - they settle in the shells of hermit crabs and feed on the excrement of the owner. Both cancer (its shell always remains clean) and duck (never have to worry about getting food) benefit from this. Another species lives between the parapodia of the polychaete worm, in this case the duck pierces the body of the host with its stalk and wraps its digestive tract with a net.

Reproduction of sea ducks

These creatures reproduce in a rather peculiar way. Most sea ducks are bisexual, but fertilization, as a rule, takes place between different individuals. They lay their eggs in the cavity of their own house. Ducks have a very long male copulatory organ; it is, in fact, a protrusion of the reduced abdominal region. A duck can stick it out of the shell by 15-20 centimeters. She sticks her male organ into the shell of another individual and secretes a seed, thus, she fertilizes the laid eggs. If no one fertilized the duck, then self-fertilization can occur in it.

At certain types deep-sea ducks, even more complex phenomena occur that were noticed by Darwin. Most of these ducks are dioecious creatures. The females are well developed, but the males are small. They are attached to the body of the female singly or in pairs. There are bisexual species, in the bodies of which degraded males additionally live. And there are species that have females and bisexual organisms, in the bodies of which small males live.

Nowadays, even in Kamchatka, you can hardly surprise anyone with lobsters, lobsters or tiger prawns, which have become quite common on the shelves of local supermarkets, although not everyone can afford them. Few today can
boast that they have tasted sea ducks,
which are the most expensive crustaceans in the world, the cost of which is
more than 300 US dollars per kilogram.
Everyone who has ever been to the seashore has probably paid attention to the formations of white color resembling miniature volcanoes, usually densely covering coastal stones, rocks and underwater parts of port facilities. These formations are shells of barnacles, called sea acorns or balanuses, which are unusually firmly attached with their calcareous base to almost all motionless objects submerged in water, including the bottoms of ships standing in the port. Unlike balanus, their counterparts - sea ducks - are attached to the substrate with an elongated fleshy stem.
Barnacles
Barnacles are a highly modified group of crustaceans, which is associated with their peculiar way of life. The body of these animals is hidden in a calcareous house similar to a mollusk shell, consisting of individual plates that stand out from the surface of the skin folds. Some plates are fixedly connected to each other and make up the walls of the house. Others form its cover and can close and open. Through the gap between these movable plates, the animal communicates with the external environment. At the bottom of the house-shell, the crustacean itself is located with its back down, the anterior section of which in sea acorns is turned into a flat wide sole, and in sea ducks - into an elongated fleshy stalk.
Sea ducks are found in almost all areas of the World Ocean, but their greatest diversity is observed in warm waters. These barnacles live from the tidal zone to a depth of about 7 km. Adult sea ducks lead a passive lifestyle, attaching their stalk to the ground, but most often to various objects drifting in the seas and oceans, like buoys and pieces of rotten wood. During a 1970 trip across the Atlantic on the reed boat Ra-2, the famous explorer and traveler Thor Heyerdahl and his companions found some sea ducks in the middle of the ocean, firmly attached to balls of solidified oil. The dimensions of the body covered with calcareous plates of these barnacles do not exceed 5-6 cm. The stalk of most sea ducks is usually the same length, but in some species it reaches 60 and even 75 cm.
Sea ducks feed on various planktonic organisms and organic particles, which are filtered out of the water with the help of their mustache-shaped pectoral legs. To do this, they periodically stick them out from under the movable lid on the top of the house, strain the food with quick strokes and, as it were, throw it into their mouths. Unlike balanuses, sea ducks swaying from side to side on their fleshy stalks can catch a slightly larger amount of water.
Although the majority of sea ducks are hermaphrodites, i.e. each individual has both testes and ovaries, and fertilization usually occurs crosswise. A fertilized egg hatches into a free-swimming larva with three pairs of limbs used for locomotion and feeding. After several molts, it is partially covered with a shell of two valves, and then attaches to the substrate and turns into an adult animal, forming an elongated fleshy stalk and secreting a strong calcareous almond-shaped house around it.
Myth
Sea ducks owe their name to an ancient belief, according to which wild ducks, more precisely, geese, appear from them. A myth that has existed in the British Isles for more than five hundred years claimed that the small goose, now known as the barnacle goose, does not hatch from an egg, as an ordinary bird does, but from creatures attached to floating objects. Such a theory had a certain common sense, because the stem, the shell and the whirlpool legs of sea ducks, which are somewhat similar to underdeveloped feathers, could in imagination be represented as the neck, body and plumage of bird embryos. Since at that time no one knew where the barnacle goose nests were located (later it was found that this goose nests far to the north on the coast of Greenland, Svalbard and some other Arctic islands) and did not see its eggs, people sincerely believed in this myth.
The fiction about the birth of barnacle goose from sea ducks had for many years, especially in medieval Ireland, an important practical value, as it allowed the clergy of the Roman catholic church classify this goose as a fish and not as a bird, and allow his parishioners to eat it on fast days.
The coastal inhabitants of Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece traditionally collect sea ducks and use them for food. In Spanish Galicia, the Fiesta de Los Percebes is even held in their honor. However, the extraction of these crustaceans is associated with considerable risk: hunters for such exotic seafood descend on slippery, algae-covered stones at low tide and look for colonies of sea ducks hiding in crevices.
Peculiar taste
Sea ducks have juicy pinkish-white meat. Steamed right in the shell and served with a seafood sauce, these outlandish crustaceans, according to gourmets, have a very peculiar taste, reminiscent of both an oyster and a lobster. They are also eaten raw with a seasoning of vinegar and olive oil, tearing off the keratinized tip of the leg and sucking out the tender core. Apparently, because sea ducks are not only extremely tasty, but also quite rare and extremely expensive, culinary specialists sometimes call them “sea truffles”.

Sea ducks are the closest relative of the sea acorn from the order of barnacles.

Ducks also live in dense limestone houses with a lid. However, unlike the sea acorn, the front parts of the sea duck's head grow into a long stalk sticking out through a hole in the bottom of the house. On this stalk she sits, attaching them to the substrate. In some species of ducks, the stalk is covered with calcareous scales, which makes it thicker and more reliable.

Unlike sea acorns, ducks tend to "love" to change places. They are attached not to rocks and other reliable fixed objects, but to floating pieces of wood, pumice, and algae. On such floats, ducks plow the expanses of the oceans. They often use fish, mundane turtles, swimming crabs, and various sharks as swimming means. Very often, ducks settle on their counterparts - sea acorns, which in turn are attached to whales. Ducks of a rather ordinary type themselves secrete a foamy float and, hanging under its “bottom”, swim singly or in groups.

Where do sea ducks live?

In tropical waters, ducks hunt for siphonophores ("Portuguese man-of-war" from the class of hydroid polyps). Feeling the approach of the "Portuguese boat", the ducks begin to work smoothly with their legs, and the raft turns towards the prey. They are not afraid of the stinging cells of the siphonophore, which carry a strong poison, since they are protected by a shell, and therefore they thoroughly gnaw the victim, working hard with their mandibles.

The reproduction of sea ducks is very peculiar. Most of them are bisexual creatures, but fertilization usually occurs between different individuals. Duck eggs are laid in the cavity of their house. The male copulatory organ of these animals is very long, it is an outgrowth of the reduced abdominal region and is able to protrude from the shell by 15-20 centimeters. Penetrating into the shell of a neighbor duck, he releases sperm there, which fertilizes the laid eggs. In solitary ducks, self-fertilization can occur.

In some deep-sea ducks, a more complex phenomenon is observed, which was discovered by C. Darwin. Among such ducks, often sitting alone, most are dioecious animals. Their females are normally developed, while the males are quite small, bag-shaped and sit singly or in pairs, attached to the body of the female. There are bisexual species, in the shell cavity of which additional degraded males live. And finally, there are crustaceans in which normal individuals are represented by both females and bisexual organisms, inside whose houses dwarf males live. Scientists suggest that the ancient barnacles were dioecious organisms, but due to the transition to a sedentary lifestyle, when you can be alone for life, they became bisexual. Therefore, those species in which males remained normal or slightly degraded should be considered the most ancient, and those species in which males turned into dwarf appendages of females or disappeared altogether should be considered the youngest in historical time scales.