Barnacles on the flotsam
PS: This is my first submission: Please don't shoot me down. Yes I am new here.
I agree with Chesty Morgan that barnacles are important.
Thanks also to Acklington and Europaflyer for useful comments.
The barnacles attached to debris washed up on Reunion Island are goose barnacles, and of a type that inhabit anything floating, but not anything submerged deeper than about 10 metres.
The size of barnacles has often been used as indicators for the time or any shipwreck or floating marine debris has been at or near the sea surface.
There are several cases relating to dating recent NZ shipwrecks by studying attached barnacles.
An experienced marine biologist could easily determine the time any bit of an aircraft had spent floating by examination of growth lines and size of the barnacles.
I am not fully expert in this, but by the size of the attached goose barnacles (and without any exact scale in any of the pictures), I would guess that the bit of flaperon has been in the shallow sea for somewhere between 10 and 24 months, and no longer.
I note also that all of the attached goose barnacles are about the same size, so it looks like the juvenile barnacles attached to the flaperon at about the same time (and when in the shallow oceanic zone), so probably the time that it first reached the sea surface.
But I am happy to be proved wrong by a more experienced and dedicated marine biologist.
I advise that investigators should use marine biologists from Australia, S Africa, or NZ to determine the time that the flaperon was floating in the shallow Indian Ocean. The biota of the Atlantic is quite different, and irrelevant.
Any alternative suggestions welcome.