Bizarre orange ‘alien egg sacs’ are discovered in river – baffling local ecologists
- The luminous blob was extracted from the water by volunteers in Utrecht
A mysterious glowing orange blob has been pulled from a canal in the Netherlands – with baffled local ecologists labelling it ‘bizarre’.
Pictures show the enormous alien-like sack after it was extracted from the water by volunteers in Utrecht.
‘This was hanging on the bottom of a floating island’, the group said of the unusual discovery, made earlier this month.
They revealed that the strange entity was in fact made up of animals known as water bag bryozoans, which group together in colonies.
‘The big bag is formed by several animals together. At a certain point they form a colony and different colonies can then stick together again,’ urban ecologist Anne Nijs said.
‘A bag can become two metres in diameter. That bag then attaches itself to something,’ she explained.
She added that the find is particularly surprising as the hermaphrodite creatures are not native to Utrecht and are considered ‘exotics’.
‘It is the first time that they have been discovered here. So it is a very special story,’ ,’ Nijs told Dutch news site AD.
‘But fortunately they do not harm the environment here,’ she added.
The harmless nature of the aquatic animals means it was safe to return the sack to where it was found beneath the islet.
They are thought to originate from the east coast of the US, and were first found in Europe in 1883 in Germany.
The species has been found across western Europe since the 90s, and is spreading ‘rapidly’, according to Nijs.
Large clumps of the micro-organisms were spotted in McGee Creek Reservoir in Oklahoma over the summer.
Some feared that the strange jelly-like balls might be dangerous, while conspiracy theories that they were ‘alien egg pods’ also reportedly circulated.
Officials stepped in to reassure locals. Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation (ODWC) shared a picture of them on Facebook, writing: ‘These are Bryozoans, and they’ll likely show up in large numbers this summer.
‘Don’t be alarmed these microorganisms are native and are of no danger to you or wildlife.’
Bryozoans are tiny animals, no larger than four millimetres, which form colonies of numerous connected units called zooids.
They are invertebrates and have male and female reproductive organs, meaning they can self-clone.
They mainly feast on bacteria and phytoplankton found in the water, and their fossil record shows evidence of them as long as 500 millions years ago.
