What are Bryozoans?

Bryozoans, also known as moss animals or sea mats, are surrounded by colonial animals found around the world of the oceans. They prefer warm, tropical water. Bryozoans has its own phylum Bryozoa, a member of the Superfylum Lophotrochozoa, Lophophophorates. What all members of this group have in common is that they use a characteristic under -shape, cylinder -shaped or curled -up feed called Lophophore. Lophophores are used for filter feeding and evolve from a simple ring of cilia around the mouth. Most Bryozoan is stationary, although some colonies can crawl around and at least one species is free floating. This skeleton can often be found by stretching shells of molluscs found on the beach, and can be scraped with a shake with a finger under running water. Some species of Bryozoan do not build skeletons and are held together by mucus. Bryozoans are highly colonial, again like corals to which they are only remotely connected, and create colonies until severalLika meters across, although several centimeters across it is more typical. Individual members in the Bryozoan colony are small, usually between 0.5 and 5 mm.

Bryozoans are coelomate animals, which means they have a body cavity and a simple intestine with mouth and rectum. In addition to Lophophor, that's about it. Bryozoans lack circulatory, motor or respiratory systems because of their small size and stationary lifestyle. Oxygen differs directly into the animal cells because it is so small. They also have an extremely simple nervous system. Bryozoans are located in a fossil record starting at the early Ordovici (488 million years ago), but maybe they existed earlier, in Cambrian, but at the moment lacked a hard skeleton. It is likely to develop from ancestors of similar phhoronide. Phoronides are another simple group of Lophophorates.

There are about 8,000 live Bryozoan species, with 50 types of fresh water and the rest ofsea. They are sometimes colored - blue, brown, purple or red - and their colonies can be seen in snorkeling. Bryozoans serve as consumers at the first level in the water pyramid of water food, consume small bacteria and unicellular organisms and provide food grazing animals such as sea hedgehogs and fish. They create a significant part of the Post-Kambia Paleozoic fossil record. Sometimes their skeletons are found in thick leaves in the paleozoic layers, making it difficult to locate fossils of anything else.