Which reminds me.... haven't taken my vitamins yet today. Gotta give the body the raw materials.

Interestingly, this chemistry goes on when we are growing connective tissue as well.

It's amazing what you can learn just sitting here reading. Thanks for the info, jb. As one who is semi-literate in chemistry, I half understood it. (No sarcasm intended.)

I know a pirate who might find this info helpful.

The understanding of how barnacles adhere is not new. I have been teaching that for ten years in one of my classes. Barnacles and several mollusks secrete their own polymerization initiator to form covalent bonds with the hydroxyl groups on most surfaces. The process involves L-DOPA (as in dopamine) and is quite similar to tanning chemistry.

To surfaces for which covalent bonds cannot easily be formed, and often as a precursor to such covalent bonding, barnacles use van der Waals interactions to form relatively weak "bonds" with surfaces in a way similar to geckos and frogs. Some mollusks also employ polymer-polymer entanglement. To visualize this, think of the difficulty of disentangling cooked spaghetti.

I have learned a lot on this subject sitting on thesis and dissertation committees of students from Geoff Swain's group. Geoff is the co-editor of Biofouling. Not only is biofouling critical to the shipping industry, it is also vital to the biomedical implant industry.

We need some of this stuff to attach a growing litany of scandals and abuses to the WH.