Cisco's Sonar - Bryozoans

I've worked on Bear Lake my adult life. During that time, I came up with a lot of questions that I had no answers for. One was when I examined stomachs from fish caught in gill nets, we would sometimes find a gelatinous material in them. I could never figure out what it was since there were no organs or any identifiable animal-like characteristics. 

The other day I saw an article on the Internet about the gelatinous material rolling up on the beaches in a pond. My curiosity got the best of me, so I read it and found out that they were called moss animals, or bryozoans. After researching I've concluded that gelatinous material in Bear Lake that we found in fishes’ stomachs were actually colonies of bryozoans. I don’t have a picture but visualize gelatin just laying on a plate. I have never seen one in its natural state but apparently, they are common, been around for millions of years and are found worldwide in marine and freshwater environments. 

They are tiny animals, no larger than 4 millimeters (5/32 of an inch) wide. They float alone for a time, but eventually form colonies, working together for mutual benefit. In this way, they are much like coral. Bryozoans also make fragile structures from calcium carbonate that may be attached to the substrate or free-floating. Each animal is called a zooid, feeds itself with a horseshoe of tentacles, while filtering algae and plankton from the water. There may be thousands in a colony. They don’t have any organs or blood surviving by diffusing stuff from the water. They die each winter and fire up in the spring. You can learn much more about them by doing a Google search. 

So, another one of the hundreds of questions I still have about the Bear Lake ecosystem has an answer. I wish I had the time and ambition to figure out things like what happens to whitefish/cisco eggs after they hatch, what effects the currents in the lake, what about freshwater sponges, how do cladocerns fit into food habits and so on and so on. ….