About

Have you ever spotted a lacy mesh-like growth on seaweed whilst rockpooling and wondered what it was? These patches are called sea mats and can cover huge sections of the fronds of kelp and seaweed on rocky shores. Sea mats are a colony of individual animals called zooids. If you look closely, you'll see what look a bit like cells - these individual little boxes are each home to one zooid. The zooids filter feed on phytoplankton using special feeding tentacles called a lophophore. They can reproduce asexually to increase the size of the colony - which can grow by several millimetres a day! The name for these colonies is "Bryozoan", a large and diverse array of colonial creatures known as Sea Mosses.