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365 Urban Species. #260: Freshwater Bryozoan
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urbpan. A small colony attached to a stick is pulled out of the water to be examined. Location: Ward's Pond, Boston.Urban species #260: Freshwater bryozoan Pectinatella magnifica
A football-sized clump of gelatinous material in a pond may not be an egg mass. You may encounter a colony of animals called bryozoans, or as that obsolete scientific name translates, "moss animals". Bryozoans make cockroaches look like spring chickens: their fossil record extends back 500 million years. The vast majority of the thousands of species in this group live in salt water, with only 50 or so found in fresh water. This one, Pectinatella magnifica (with no good common name but sometimes referred to as "blobs") is the one most often seen in urban waterways. I have seen it in Spectacle Pond at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge Mass., and recently found it in Ward's Pond in Boston. It also apparently occurs in the waters of the Connecticut and Potomoc rivers. Bryozoans have a similar ecology to corals. Hundreds of thousands of individual animals (or "zooids" in zoological jargon) live together, secreting a jelly-like matrix, growing quickly in favorable conditions. Favorable conditions include water temperatures of 68 degrees or more (20 degrees or more celcius) and large amounts of food: single-celled algae, bacteria, and other microorganisms, conditions not uncommon in urban ponds in summer. Each zooid has tiny tentacles with which it grabs food particles. Rapidly growing bryozoan colonies are alarming to some people, and may create problems when they form on intake pipes and other structures. However, it seems that their presence and growth may potentially be a good indicator of water quality.
Found in Pleasure Bay, South Boston. Photos by
cottonmanifesto.
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And I've seen those before, and wondered what they were. Thank you much for enlightening me. This blog is amazing.
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They remind me of fish eggs.
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The nervous system is composed of a single bilobed ganglion at the base of the lophophore near the pharynx. This has a number of nerves leading off from it to the internal organs and muscles, it also connects to a nerve net in the body wall and the nerve ring which supplies nerves to the tentacles of the lophophore.
http://www.earthlife.net/inverts/bryozoa.html
No mention of how or if the zooids coordinate their activities.
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I've studied a bit of paleobiology, and in last semester's Paleobiology Seminar, my class plucked some fossil bryozoans out of Paleozoic outcrops in Missori. They generally resembled this (http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~paleo/mayer/wis-bryozoan.jpg) morphotype (and often had crinoid stem pieces intermixed in the matrix, as in the picture). Bryozoans are neat, strange animals.
Wow, the saltwater bryozoan looks really familiar. I think I've seen that species before in one of my marine labs, and we had to memorize the Latin binomial... I want to say it's Botryllus schlosseri, but I'm not 100% sure.
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http://depts.washington.edu/fhlk12/StudentProjects/Tun.biology.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7079/abs/nature04336.html
I suppose a sessile existance is common to many unrelated marine animals, all of which can be inconvenient to human industry: barnicles, zebra mussels, sea squirts, bryozoans, and so on.
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Tunicates are in the Phylum Chordata, Subphylum Urochordata.
I can feel everyone caring. ;)
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Bryozoan in Florida Pond
(Anonymous) 2007-05-07 02:12 am (UTC)(link)Re: Bryozoan in Florida Pond
It's a harmless colony of animals, if that makes you feel any better!