Bizarre 'glowing' orange bag of animals pulled from Dutch river – Metro.co.uk

October 25, 2024 ndowd

NEWS… BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT
Ecologists in a Dutch city were baffled when presented with a ‘glowing’ orange bag of wildlife.
The rare bryozoans – small invertebrates which can form in groups of thousands, forming a ‘bag shape’ – were discovered on the bottom of a floating island in Utrecht, Holland.
Ecologist Anne Nijs told AD: ‘This was hanging on the bottom of a floating island. These are animals that form a colony together: water bag bryozoans.
‘Multiple colonies can grow together into floating bags of up to 2 meters in diameter. In America they are also called “the blob”.’
The ‘glowing’ bag is actually multiple animals living in a colony, Ms Nijs said, and they aren’t common in the Netherlands.
‘But fortunately they do not harm the environment here,’ she added.
‘A bag can become 2 meters in diameter. That bag then attaches itself to something,’ she said.
Regardless, the sight of a bright orange floating ‘bag’ of multiple organisms is not for the light hearted.
Bryozoans are common in America, but have spread across the globe in the past century.
Earlier this year, mass amounts of them were spotted in an reservoir in Oklahoma, sparking conspiracies of ‘alien egg pods’.
Bryozoans are clumps of creatures known as zooids, they are a fraction of a millimeter long and form the slimy mass.
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They can self-clone because they have both male and female reproductive organs.