These tiny animals are no larger than 0.16 inches across. An individual is called a zooid, and it lives in a box-like shell of calcium carbonate and chitin. They look a bit like coral, due to their feeding structure, called a locophore, which is a u-shaped or circular ring of ciliated tentacles.
Habitat
Bryozoan colonies can be found on a variety of hard surfaces, including rocky substrates, the shells of other invertebrates, kelp blades, or even floating ice. There is at least one free-swimming solitary species known.
Diet
Filter feeds on phytoplankton, diatoms, and bacteria.
Life History
Depending on the species, reproduction can occur via broadcast spawning or by brooding the eggs internally. A larval bryozoan will swim about until it finds a suitable surface to settle on. It will then change to its adult form and asexually reproduces by budding off clones to grow a colony.
IUCN Status
Not Evaluated
Ecosystem & Cultural Importance
A bryozoan colony’s structure can provide habitat for juvenile fishes and a variety of small invertebrates. Bryozoans serve as food for diverse animals such as sea slugs, fishes, urchins, and sea spiders.
The kelp encrusting bryozoan (Membranipora membranacea) is one type of bryozoan that often grows as a thin, flat white crust on bull kelp or rocks in both the intertidal and shallow subtidal. The colony is usually circular and has many small, rectangular structures with thin walls which contain the individual zooids, which are almost clear. If a sea slug has been feeding on the colony, it may grow spines, especially on the zooids at the periphery of the circle.
There are more than 5,000 bryozoan species, nearly all of which are colonial, and they can occur in various forms, including gelatinous blobs, to flat, encrusting sheets, or leaflike bushes.
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