Creepy ‘glowing’ orange sack of self-cloning hermaphrodite slime hauled from river leaving experts baffled
Date: 2024-10-25THIS mysterious glowing orange bag of animals was pulled from a river in the Netherlands.
The creepy luminous bag has mysterious dark patches over it and looks like a dinosaur egg, with the find leaving experts baffled.
The shade of bright orange gives the bag the effect of volcanic magma.
They are Bryozoans – a rare group of small slimy invertebrates that form colonies of thousands – causing their ‘bag’ shape.
The prehistoric-looking discovery was found in Utrecht, Holland.
Ecologist Anne Nijs told AD how special this discovery is.
Anne said: “And it is the first time that they have been discovered here. So it is a very special story.
“This was hanging on the bottom of a floating island. These are animals that form a colony together: water bag Bryozoans.
“In America, the bag is known as ‘the blob’.
“A bag can become 2 meters in diameter. That bag then attaches itself to something.
“But fortunately they do not harm the environment here.”
The creepy sack was pulled from the bottom of a floating island, making a puzzling find for experts.
Even more puzzling is that the bizarre water creatures are not native to the Netherlands.
‘Alien egg pods’
Bryozoans are common in America, but in the past century, they have spread across the globe.
Earlier this year, several of the outlandish sea dwellers were spotted in a reservoir in Oklahoma, sparking conspiracies of ‘alien egg pods’.
Bryozoans are mysterious clumps of creatures known as zooids, they are a fraction of a millimetre long and form a slimy mass when together.
The animals originally come from the eastern part of the US.
They were first found in Europe in 1883 in Germany.
Unusual sea creatures
Dumbo octopus
The Dumbo Octopus – named after the famous cartoon elephant – was filmed in 2019 by an unmanned submersible on the seabed at a depth of nearly 7km in the Indian Ocean’s Java Trench, which is the deepest reliable record for any cephalopod.
Gulper eel
A Gulper eel is equipped with enormous jaws that extend backwards from the head, terminating in a pair of elbow-like hinges. Gulpers are lunge feeders, taking in smaller prey with a huge mouthful of water.
Costasiella sea slug
The Costasiella sea slug – also known as the ‘leaf sheep’ – spends much of its time grazing on marine algae. It separates the chloroplasts (the green organelles within a plant’s cells that convert sunlight into chemical energy) making the slug a rare example of a photosynthetic animal.
Emperor Shrimp
An emperor shrimp will spend its whole life on the back of its seaslug host. The shrimp provides a dedicated cleaning service in return for the protection bestowed by the mollusc’s chemical defences.
They are unique in their reproductive capabilities, and able to self-clone because they possess male and female sex organs.
All of the species emit sperm into the water, whilst some also release ova into the water.
Others capture sperm via their tentacles to fertilise their ova internally.
The fascinatingly eerie animals strain food out of the water with their ‘hollow’ tentacles.
There are 5,869 living species of Bryozoans are known.
Single animals, called zooids, live throughout the colony and are not fully independent.
These smart individuals can have unique and diverse functions.
Different colonies have different functions
All colonies have “autozooids”, which are responsible for feeding, excretion, and supplying nutrients to the colony.
Colonies take a variety of peculiar forms, including fans, bushes and sheets.
Some classes have specialist zooids like hatcheries for fertilized eggs, colonial defence structures, and root-like attachment structures.
“Cheilostomata” is the most diverse form of Bryozoan, its members have the widest range of specialist zooids.
They have mineralized exoskeletons and form single-layered sheets which encrust over surfaces.
Some colonies can creep very slowly by using spiny defensive zooids as legs.
After the weird and wonderful Bryozoan were named, another group of animals was discovered whose filtering mechanism looked similar.
So it was included in Bryozoa until 1869 when the two groups were noted to be very different internally
The new group was given the name “Entoprocta”, while the original Bryozoa were called “Ectoprocta”.
