Hard, egg looking things on zoa.

ohizzey · Mar 23, 2023

Hard, tiny things all over zoas. They come off as strings when pulled. They do not seem to move at all. Among them was a small grub like animal that was ~2mm in diameter and had a see through body. It looked like a tiny shrimp, I could see two black eyes. Wasn't able to get picture.

Also, red tube-worm looking shell on the right could be related?

ISpeakForTheSeas · Mar 23, 2023

ohizzey said:
Hard, tiny things all over zoas. They come off as strings when pulled. They do not seem to move at all. Among them was a small grub like animal that was ~2mm in diameter and had a see through body. It looked like a tiny shrimp, I could see two black eyes. Wasn't able to get picture.

Also, red tube-worm looking shell on the right could be related?

The pic isn’t super clear (if you can get closer up photos of one of each individual thing/species you’re trying to ID, that may help with this), but the tube-worm-looking shell on the right seems to be curled like a typical vermetid snail tube. The hard tiny things look like they could potentially be colonial tunicates (see the quote below for photos to compare against), but I’m not sure. If not tunicates, then closer pics will likely be needed:

ISpeakForTheSeas said:
Haha, yeah sorry - that's part of why I threw in the TLDR at the bottom there. Here are some photos of colonial tunicates with similar body structure (and some with - from what I can tell - similar coloration) to help decide if it is a colonial tunicate:

(The two above images are from here: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/14/11/977 )

And the link below has a bunch more pics (some are different colonial tunicates like above, some are solitary tunicates):

Ascideacea

www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu