4 / September 2022 The South Marysburgh Mirror Natural South Marysburgh The Foul and the Loathsome It was somewhere in South Bay | think the caller said he found it. The unidentified object was attached to a piece of a submerged branch and it jiggled like a waterlogged plastic bag when he prodded it with his fishing rod. It was the size of a basketball, he continued - round and translucent, somewhat textured, but so slimy as to defy touching. Finally, he closed his eyes and gently lifted the object from the water for a clos- er look. | am guessing this fellow was a farmer and had al- ready experienced many questionable textures, and had probed numerous dark recesses where most hands seldom venture. He said he rotated it for some clue as to what it might be. The sensation was not unlike holding a quivering ball of Jell-O, the only difference being, that it was decidedly sticky. | smiled as the caller talked on, as | already knew what Bryozoa are aquatic organisms. Photo by Bev Lynn he had found. Others had been finding them, too. These weird gelatinous things are called Bryozoans and are actually aquatic organisms, but are classified as animals. Some of us know them better as "moss animals". These little aquatic or- ganisms live in colonies of interconnected individuals forming masses such as we have found in recent years. Sometimes they float freely, other times they attach themselves to rocks, or to plant material in the water. One large cluster of Bryozo- ans was found a few years ago attached to a dock at Wellers Bay. The Bryozoans that turn up at this time of the year are mostly the soft and gelatinous variety, but they do occur as tufted leaf-like fronds or even hard calcified skeletons, not unlike coral. Almost all Bryozoans are colonial, composed of anywhere from a few to millions of individuals. The one he held in his hands likely contained millions of individuals, all amassed to form this globulus gel. Although an animal they don’t really move around, although some species do to a cer- tain degree. How do they reproduce? Bryozoans are able to propagate both sexually and asexually, the latter occurring by budding off new zooids (individual functioning units) as the colony grows. If a piece of the colony breaks off, this piece can con- tinue to grow and form a new colony. Most are hermaphro- ditic—that is, individuals possessing both ovaries and testes. Some shed both eggs and sperm into the water where they fuse, but the majority brood their eggs in tiny chambers, cap- turing free-swimming sperm with their tentacles to fertilize the eggs. The eggs divide, develop into free-swimming larvae, escape from the brood chamber, and swim away to settle on an object somewhere to metamorphose into a new zooid, thus starting a new colony. Of course, we can’t see this unless we were to somehow view the whole process under a micro- scope. All we get to see is the mass of millions that have unit- ed to form something we can observe floating in the water— or hold in our hand, for those who dare to experience the sensation. At first glance, Bryozoans superficially appear to have more in common with coral, but Bryozoans and corals belong to quite different phyla and are unrelated. A glob that we may find is actually a colony of zooids, not polyps as in corals. And each of these zooids has whorls of delicate feeding tentacles gently swaying in the water catching food. Bryozoans feed on minute organisms, including diatoms and other unicellular algae. In turn, they are fed upon by grazing organisms such as small fish and are subject to competition from algae. Who knows what daily routine in their lives we interrupt by lifting specimens out of the water. And these little critters have been around for awhile. They have a fossil record extending back some 500,000,000 years, to the upper Cambrian period. Identifying a mass as a Bryozoa (or plural Bryozoan since there are millions of them in one cluster) is enough for us. To identify the exact species would be a painstaking job as there are about 5,000 living species in the world. Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water. Terry Sprague is a County field naturalist who lives on Big Island. His website on nature in the county can be found at www.naturestuff.net and he can be reached at Terry and Christie—