Image of a Bryozoan Skeleton

This is a marine organism magnified 100 times. The black-and-white scanning electron microscope view reveals the calcium carbonate skeleton of Cradoscrupocellaria tenuirostris. It’s a bryozoan – one of a staggeringly diverse group with about 30,000 species worldwide. We shared a different one back in March. All bryozoans are made up of a series of compartmented individual animals called zooids (ZO-ids).

Some of the variety you see among compartments is the result of different zooids specializing in feeding, reproduction, defense, and so on. This specimen was collected from algae off Isla Tiburon (the largest island in the Gulf of California) in March 1985 by Howard/Berry Chair of Malacology Henry W. Chaney, PhD. Forty years later, Dr. Chaney produced the image above, during a major push by the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History to make collection data for its thousands of bryozoans digitally available to researchers around the world.