Over the course of the next two episodes, we’re going to talk about how we can use fresh evidence involving gooseneck barnacles, Lepas anatifera, to gain new insight into the fate of MH370. This is an organism we’ve talked about a lot already. We first met them in Episode 18: The Flaperon, when we talked about how the first piece of debris washed ashore on La Réunion Island. A striking feature of the flaperon was that it was covered all over in fleshy-stalked creatures, which scientists realized could point the way to the plane’s wreckage.

In Episode 19: The Impossible Drift we looked at some puzzling aspects of the debris, including the fact that marine biologists were stumped as to how Lepas could have grown on a part of the flaperon that stuck high up out of the water. We went more deeply into these issues in Episode 20: Lepas Don’t Lie with renowned invertebrate researcher Jim Carlton.

A uniting concept across these episodes is that Lepas barnacles can be used as a robust and reliable way to measure how long debris has been in the water. Combined with drift modeling, they can tell you when and where something went in the water. In the case of MH370, they can tell us what happened to the plane. In the next episode, we’ll reveal the new evidence that we’ve found.

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