A bryozoan the size of a basketball delighted the aquatic botany students on Chippewa Lake. 

Statoblasts that have become float oblasts and are ready to float away!

Statoblasts in various stages of development. 

A bryozoan the size of a basketball delighted the aquatic botany students on Chippewa Lake.

A bryozoan the size of a basketball delighted the aquatic botany students on Chippewa Lake. 

Statoblasts that have become float oblasts and are ready to float away!

Statoblasts in various stages of development. 

A bryozoan the size of a basketball delighted the aquatic botany students on Chippewa Lake.

“Hey, I’ve got something over here!” called one of the paddlers on our Aquatic Plant Ecology and Identification field trip last week. He was floating in a sparse patch of wild rice near the edge of Chippewa Lake east of Cable. “It’s about the size of a soccer ball,” Pat exclaimed, just in case we assumed he had discovered yet another species of pond weed or something.

“Is it gelatinous?” asked our instructor Paul Skawinski, Citizen Lake Monitoring Network Educator with UWSP / Extension Lakes and author of Aquatic Plants of the Upper Midwest, as he began paddling over. “Looks like it,” responded Pat. Paul already had a good idea of what he would find, and a name popped into my head, too: bryozoan.

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