The Sacculina Carcini Essay Example

The family Arthropoda is a very interesting phylum, Arthropoda consists of crabs, centipede insects, crustaceans, and beetles. The Family Sacculinidae, commonly known as the parasitic barnacles within the genus Sacculina, subclass Cirripedia. Discovered by John Vaughan Thompson, the Sacculina carcini or more commonly known as a crab hacker barnacle. These barnacles can be found in the coasts of Western Europe and North Africa. It can be found attached to the Crab’s abdomen. 

The Sacculina carcini or the crab hacker barnacle is part of the phylum Arthropoda. The word Sacculina comes from the genus and the Carcini that is Italian means crab. The phylum Arthropoda are animals with an invertebrate meaning they are lacking a backbone. This Arthropod has an exoskeleton meaning  that the skeleton is a ridged out covering that does not grow with exoskeleton. They do have a segmented abdomen. Theses barnacles are not your normal barnacle aside from being a parasite, they look like small slugs before infecting them, and they grow a tendril which helps them get the nutrients that it needs from their host.

These barnacles have a very interesting life cycle. A female Sacculina Carcini larva settles on a suitable crab host and crawls around it surface until it finds a good spot to set up a “base”. It develops into a form called a kentrogon, which inserts a stylet(A anatomical structure found in some invertebrates that is used for piercing mouth parts and is a hardened protrusile opening to the stomach.³It moves into the crab and pushing out a sac on the underside of the crabs' abdomen. The tendrils then take over the stomach, intestine, and nervous system to absorb nutrients and helps the parasite to control the behavior of its host.