I've been drawing a lot recently and I wanted to have a little spot where I could post it. I draw mostly my own characters, and would love for you to peruse aha.
Expect regular updates ^_^
Cover art is by me.
Art trades open :)
Okay so I'm gonna be real with you guys, I actually drew this months ago.
I kept trying to write a little text summary for what this character was based off of but I could never get it finished because it always ended up being too long. But here it is:
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The animal that this character is based off of is called sacculina carcini. It is a parasitic barnacle from the family rhizocephala.
The moment I first heard about this animal I knew I had to make this character. I reeeeaaally wanna go into them but they're just.. so weird.? Like picture what a barnacle looks like and then google "sacculina" and you'll observe that that bulbous, cancerous tumour looking growth protruding from the poor crabs gonads is a barnacle that looks nothing like a barnacle.
But rhizocephala barnacles are notable, for the twisted and disturbing ways they've evolved to survive off of their crab hosts.
One of the more well known things about them is that they favour female crabs to male crabs. Their goal is to trick the crab into caring for it as though it were its own eggs. When a rhizocephala barnacle attaches itself onto a male, it is capable of rearranging the crabs hormonal glands until the crab turns into a female. This will change the crab both morphologically and behaviourally.
You see there are two parts to the rhizocephala barnacle. The externa, which is the egg sack and sits on the crabs gonads; and the interna, which are often described by scientists as "roots". They are this long, fleshy tendrils that grow throughout the inside of the crab. These roots will grow and suffocate every organ, limb, and vessel of the crab. This is an illustration that I found of it.
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CT scans done on infected crabs show that the ends of these tendrils embed themselves directly into the crabs brain, and it has been long understood by ecological biologists that these barnacles not only change the crab physiologically, but are also directly capable of straight up mind control. Like that one zombie fungus but somehow even more insane.
And it boggles me that we know of an animal that is straight up capable of mind control, and yet the vast majority of studies which have been done on the barnacle are exclusively focussed on the Egg Sack part of it??? Like I get from an ecological standpoint why they would wanna focus on the part of the animal that makes more of the animal, but I feel like researching this made me go insane.
There is so little known about this nightmare sci-fi horror movie monster from hell and I feel like that's not fair - to me specifically!
I wanted to try and make this chapter all ookey spooky and purple prose-y, but I've put off posting this art for too long. So if you're still curious about the animal you're welcome to go down your own research rabbit hole, so you can join me and we can freak out about it together.
