Creepy ‘glowing’ orange orb of self-cloning hermaphrodite slime hauled from river leaving experts baffled
THIS is the mysteriously glowing orange bag of animals that was pulled from a river.
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, not for the faint hearted.
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 the find puzzling to experts.
Even more puzzling is that the bizarre water creatures are not native to the Netherlands.
Bryozoans are common in America, but in the past century they have spread across the globe.
Earlier this year, mass amounts of the outlandish sea dwellers were spotted in an 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 the 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.
They are unique in their reproductive capabilities, 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.
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”.