It was early morning in my office when my colleague, Boris, entered with the big, enthusiastic smile. It's 7 AM, what weird idea he got, I wonder...

B: Hey Alex, do we have some spin-trap, I made the extracts from Bryozoa!
A: Bryo-what? (Bryo - moss, zoa - animal)
B: My friend, scuba-diver brought me a bunch of them. Plus, I have the paper about moss-plant extracts, I would like to do it with the moss-animals!

He came a few days later with the slimy, smelly goo with the weirdest gray-brown color I have ever seen.
After suppressing the reflex to vomit, I somehow put it in EPR. I usually have a strong stomach but this was the grossest thing I touched.

Phylum Bryozoa:

There are some 2.000 species of Bryozoa, mostly inhabiting sea water but some freshwater Bryozoa are known.

Evolutionary origin of those blobs - we have no idea.
We can't even determine if they are protostomia or deuterostomia (what is the first hole that formes, mouth or anus).

We know them from the fossil record and during the Paleozoic, Bryozoa species (some 15.000 of them) were among the dominant life forms.

Morphology:

Respiration - done by all the cells
Excretion - done by all cells
Circulatory system - who needs it
Stomack - with some "teeth-like structures"

More pictures:

Archimedus screw

Importance:

As they don't harm us, nor we eat them - nothing special.

However, some extracts showed drug-like structures, cytotoxic effect, and antitumor effects.
Keep in mind that it doesn't means that Bryozoan extracts are the cure for cancer!
It means that it can kill some cells in a Petri dish, just as 56465645 other molecules

Sources:

General
Pejin, Boris, et al. "Antioxidant volatiles of the freshwater bryozoan Hyalinella punctata." Natural product research 28.18 (2014): 1471-1475. link
Morphology
Pejin, Boris, Miloš Mojović, and Aleksandar G. Savić. "Novel antitumour natural products from the phylum Bryozoa." Biologia Serbica 35.1-2 (2014).
Images

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Wow, weird they look more like plants

Classification of the simplest animals that don't move was seriously puzzling for the early researchers, and sometimes those animals were classified as plants. At some point, even the minerals were considered to be live-like things because they could grow and retain more or less the same shape.

After suppressing the reflex to vomit, I somehow put it in EPR. I usually have a strong stomach but this was the grossest thing I touched.

We can't even determine [...] what is the first hole that formes, mouth or anus).

thanks for the picturesque description^^
@OriginalWorks

:D I still can evoke that Bryozoan goo and feel sick, 3 years later

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Sticky colony of gooey hermafrodite organisms.
You get all the goodies...

Nice post.

Not that bad to reincarnate as Bryozoan:

You get twice more potential partners - not bad
Your heart can't be broken - no hearth...
You live in colony - never alone, although not too much privacy
You can gently dance but the songs "Take my breath away" or "You are always on my mind" will be impossible to really understand with one ganglion

REALLY I NEVER HEARD THIS..THANKS FOR SHARING THIS NEWS

Never heard of it thanks for sharing this informative post.

Why vomiting? They look cool and nice :)

He extracted them :'( In methanol, ethanol and water as I remember.

After that Bryozoa he got the veto from me - plants only, nice smelly flowers and conifers!

Ahaha. You prefer to avoid hardish games ;)

Suffering per Impact factor ratio was horrible :)

Strange Animal you never heard about - Bryozoans