As it grows, it sheds its skin like a lobster, enlarges its shell, and reproduces itself without end. The barnacles encrusting a single half-mile of shore can leak into the water a million million larvae. In sea water they grow, molt, change shape wildly, and eventually, after several months, settle on the rocks, turn into adults, and build shells. Inside the shells they have to shed their skins. All in all, rock barnacles may live four years.
Sea water seems suddenly to be but a broth of barnacle bits.
I have seen the mantis' abdomen dribbling out eggs in wet bubbles like tapioca pudding glued to a thorn. I have seen a film of a termite queen as big as my face, dead white and featureless, glistening with slime, throbbing and pulsing out rivers of globular eggs. Termite workers, who looked like tiny dock workers unloading the Queen Mary, licked each egg to prevent mold as fast as it was extruded. The whole world is an incubator for incalculable numbers of eggs, each one coded minutely and ready to burst. The egg of a parasite chalcid fly, a common small fly, multiplies unassisted, making ever more identical eggs.