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.
They can self-clone because they have both male and female reproductive organs.
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This means they can also reproduce asexually if one breaks off from a colony and allows them to reproduce in even greater numbers.
They mainly feast on bacteria and phytoplankton which is found in the water.
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