Sea mats

A close-up of the Sea mat Membranipora membranacea taken with my olloclip macrolens for the iPhone. This Bryozoan forms colonies on flat seaweeds. Each rectangular chamber (cuticle) houses an individual zooid. Each zoid feeds on plankton using a lophophore, a group of ciliated tentacles. Zoids differentiate into specialized types, for feeding, cleaning the colony surface or as brood chambers for embryos.

IMG_0313

A close-up of the Hairy sea mat Electra pilosa, a species very common under rocks:

IMG_1159

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s