THANK YOU, Mount Albert Grammar School. That’s where it all started—in the fifth form, with a collection of preserved animals and Ralph Buchsbaum’s two-volume paperback classic, Animals Without Backbones.

The pages in my copy have yellowed with the years, but the text is still as fascinating to me now I’m a professional zoologist as it was in my pimply youth. And the photographs! Regenerating hydras and cross-eyed planarian worms, comb jellies, human legs bloated by elephantiasis, leeches and liver flukes, king crabs and chitons, rotifers and . . . bryozoans. There weren’t any bryozoans in the class collection. I do remember comb jellies, though, which disintegrated when I whirled them around in the jar. (Yes, sorry, that was me.)

Our family lived in New Lynn, in Auckland’s western suburbs. The property had a river running through it.

A creek, actually (except when in spate), but it had neat creatures in it, such as planarian worms, leeches, shrimps, orange nemertean worms and bryozoans—just like in the books.

When magnified, creek life became a magical world to me: an undiscovered realm, a cosmos of possibilities, an art show of shapes, colours, patterns and movements. I don’t know what it is about small invertebrates that captivates some people, but from the time I first watched live bryozoans under a low-power microscope I was hooked.

I’m not the only one. In 1856, English naturalist George Allman expressed his own admiration:
Among the most beautiful and interesting forms of invertebrate animals are those strange phytoidal productions . . . Bryozoa. They are chiefly inhabitants of the sea, where they may be witnessed under numerous plant-like guises; now spreading like a lichen over submerged stones, or old shells, or the broad fronds of Laminaria and other sea-weeds; now forming soft, irregular, fungus-like masses, or hard, calcareous branchy growths, like diminutive trees; and now again presenting the appearance of the most delicate and exquisitely formed sea-weed or moss, offering, even to the unassisted eye, in the endless repetition of the same form, objects of surpassing symmetry and beauty.

They are protean things, bryozoans. Witness their varied common names. The bushy ones used to be called “moss animals” (which is the literal meaning of “bryozoa,” from two Greek words) and the flat encrusting ones “sea mats.”

I prefer the term “lace corals,” for some indeed look like fragile lace creations, and even the encrusters form pretty sheets over seaweeds, stones and shells. But no one common name is adequate for all, so the scientific name Bryozoa (“bryozoan” in more informal usage) is probably the best all-round term. And that’s a pity in a way, too, because the now disused name Polyzoa (“many animals”) is more usefully descriptive: all bryozoans, with the exception of one or two genera that may consist of a single individual for part or most of their lives, are colonies of a few to millions of individuals. In today’s parlance we would call them “modular” or “clonal” organisms.