Kiwi Passenger
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.
The
Telegraph Live blog quotes a Reunion biologist
"Joseph Poupin, marine expert in Reunion, told the
Journal de l'Ile de la Reunion that
the barnacles attached to the mysterious debris appear to be around one year old - which corresponds with the date of the MH370 crash. He told the newspaper that the barnacles belonged to a species called Lepas Anatifera, which grow at a rate of around one to two centimetres per year."