A floating partnership – Bryozoa – Akumal, México

Apr 15, 2018 • 1:12 PM UTC

Unknown Location

140x Magnification

Microorganisms

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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As humans, we all value a piece of land to call home. It’s not so different sometimes in the ocean. Many invertebrates would colonize just about any surface you can find in the open waters. And Bryozoa are masters of colonizing just about anything.. even if it’s a floating algae.
I am on a peninsula in Mexico, and the entire coastline is covered with Sargasam (that’s for another day). But if you look closely, it’s covered with a mineralized layer.

You can see the little bulbs that keeps it afloat in the ocean. But if you look closely at all the leaves; this is what it looks like (10x mag)

I mounted one of them on a slide and put it inside a foldscope. This is a “dead” sample; so I was not expecting to see the creatures that created these homes. Take a look..

Reading more about it; seems like this is a Bryozoa of the genus Membranipora.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membranipora
You can see hundreds of little homes, packed together (its crowded here); all living in a harmony. The structures are three dimensional and perfectly patterned. Every one of them. I a surprised to see a little “red” seat at the base of house. Possibly, that’s the attachment structure that keeps the organism attached. Now I have to go out in the water and get a living organism – so I know how they all feed in such a crowded city.
Keep exploring.
Cheers
Manu
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