My favorite unconventional animal — the crab hacker barnacle

I put off writing this post for the April 2026 Bear Blog Carnival, as I usually do, because there are too many cool animals in the world. So many that I had an incredibly hard time choosing. The obvious answer, what with being the namesake of this blog, would be the wombat (and other furry brown rotund mammals). They are lesser known compared to cats and dogs, for sure. Still, they’re rather cute and fuzzy — so not quite unconventional. Naturally, I decided on a parasite instead. Not the poor crab, the yellow blob tucked underneath it. That’s Sacculina carcini, the crab hacker barnacle. Part of it, at least. Where’s the other part, you ask? The sac is only the externa, which is the reproductive part of the parasite that sticks out. The rest of the parasite, the interna, is made up of all those tendrils that have worked their way throughout the crab’s insides. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl. And yes, it is a barnacle, despite looking nothing like its hard-shelled,…