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Hydroids are small colonial animals that are often confused as plants. They grow as attached bushy growths on pilings, rocks, seaweeds and other benthic strata. The individual hydroid animals or zooids, are composed of a stem-like pedicel and a flower-like hydranth which usually contains a central mouth and tentacles. The zooids in most local species are similar in appearance but in some species the zooids differentiate into distinct types.

Gonothecae are sexual buds which can give rise to free-swimming hydromedusae (jellyfish) . These medusae are usually smaller and simpler than scyphozoans (true jellyfish)


Gosner, K.L., A Field Guide to the Atlantic Seashore, 1979, Houghton Mifflin Company

Barnes, R.D., Invertebrate Zoology, 1980, Saunders College and Holt, Rinehart and Winston.


Name Server Information for
Recorded names

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L.F. Bush
Specimens in dish

L.F. Bush
Close-up of single polyp

Unknown
Single polyp from MBL sea table

Unknown
Extreme close-up of mouth and tentacles

Gray Collection
Collected at the Fisheries jetty, Nov, 1964

P.A. Shave
Dense colony cellect at the Fishereies jetty on pilings, Nov. 1964

L.F. Bush
Specimens in dish collected at Star Island, NH, June 1968

L.F. Bush
Specimens in dish collected at Star Island, NH, June 1968
 
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