If anyone's wondering, it's because he discovered an undescribed and very strange tiny barnacle, which he nicknamed "Mister Arthrobalanus." (Now formally known as Cryptophialis minutus, and actually belongs in a sister group to true barnacles) He thought he'd try mapping out Mr Arthrobalanus's anatomical similarities to other barnacles and put together a family tree for his discovery.
In a letter to a friend he expected the project to take up to one month.
Instead he found that barnacles were such an understudied rabbit hole, the project consumed his life for ten years of dissecting stinky specimens in a dank basement while his health went to shit and his relationships deteriorated. He barely slept or ate or spoke to his own family while he analyzed barnacles mailed to him from colleagues all over the world, day and night. In the end he wrote multiple entire volumes on barnacles that remain the most detailed writing ever publicized about any single animal group.
After this he never studied or even hardly spoke of barnacles ever again except to say that he hated Mister Arthrobalanus more than any man could have ever hated a barnacle in all the world.
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