These barnacles are found, often in large numbers, attached by their flexible stalks to floating timber, the hulls of ships, piers, pilings, seaweed, and various sorts of flotsam.

Because it frequently is attached to objects carried into colder seas by currents, such as the North Atlantic Drift, it often is found well away from its place of origin and in waters too cold for it to reproduce.

[2] Lepas anatifera has long been known to grow on sea turtles, but in 2008, some small specimens were found attached to an American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus) on the Pacific coast of Mexico.

That crocodile species mostly inhabits mangrove swamps and river estuaries, but it is salt tolerant, and sometimes is found in marine environments.

Credence to the idea was provided by the tuft of brown cirri that protruded from the capitulum of the crustaceans that resembled the down of an unhatched gosling.