Please tell me animal facts!

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Hence "Anything that has a spine (and some things that don't)".

A spine is required for vertebrates.

cougars, bobcats, as well as their variants such as cheetahs, jaguars, lynx, and others related to them, all [when domesticated] behave like giant house cats, IOW they purr, meow, hiss, bond strongly with their owners.

this canadian lynx, as well as cougars and jaguars and cheetahs and the like, purrs just like a house cat. their purring mechanism is like a smaller version of the non-cartilaginous muscular tube forming an intermediate part of the trachea, that lions and other big cats use to roar.

Tunicates (see squirts) feel pain and bleed (although they have blood made up vanadium pentoxide to carry oxygen rather than haemoglobin)

the pearshaped jellyballoons in the pond? what's that
we'd call them starseed, little stars in the seperate compartments of the jelly
,
freshwater bryozoan colony
Bryozoa (also known as the Polyzoa, Ectoprocta or commonly as moss animals) are a phylum of aquatic invertebrate animals. Typically about 0.5 millimetres (1⁄64 inch) long, they are filter feeders that sieve food particles out of the water using a retractable lophophore, a "crown" of tentacles lined with cilia. Most marine species live in tropical waters, but a few occur in oceanic trenches, and others are found in polar waters. One class lives only in a variety of freshwater environments, and a few members of a mostly marine class prefer brackish water. 5869 living species are known. One genus is solitary and the rest are colonial.

A zooid or zoöid /ˈzoʊ.ɔɪd/ is a single animal that is part of a colonial animal. This lifestyle has been adopted by animals from separate unrelated taxa. Zooids are multicellular; their structure is similar to that of other solitary animals. The zooids can either be directly connected by tissue (e.g. corals, Catenulida, Siphonophorae, Pyrosome or Ectoprocta) or share a common exoskeleton (e.g. Bryozoa or Pterobranchia). The colonial organism as a whole is called a zoon /ˈzoʊ.ɒn/, plural zoa (from Ancient Greek zôion ζῷον meaning animal; plural zôia, ζῷα).

Zooids can exhibit polymorphism. For instance, in Bryozoans, there are zooids adapted for different objectives, such as feeding, anchoring the colony to the substratum and for brooding embryos.

The term zooid has historically also been used for an organic cell or organized body that has independent movement within a living organism, especially a motile gamete such as a spermatozoon (in the case of algae now zoid), or an independent animal-like organism produced asexually, as by budding or fission.

Yes in multicellular organisms (inlcuding plants) we call it cell differentiation where some cells become specialised. I think zooid colonies are a precursor to multicellularity



If they are producing mobile gametes then they are multicellular, Macrophytic algae are also zooid.

Yes. We are all just failed sea squirts.

We are supposed to be stuck to rocks, and live by sucking water into one tube, and expelling out of the other. But one day that larval form of ourselves, that swims around looking for a fresh rock for us to glue our future selves to, just simply failed to grow up and stayed at that larval stage, and kept swimming around. It spawned lancelets, and later fish, then all of the land vertebrates (amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals). And unconsciously...we are all still trying to achieve the simple life by finding that under sea rock to glue our mouths and anuses to to!

Sighhh....back when we had no eyes and no brain. Just a mouth and an anus. The simple live!

Last edited by naturalplastic on 08 Aug 2020, 8:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

Except for the rocks, we still are.

Somehow the quoting came out wrong. My apologies to Wolfram and NP.

Killer whales communicate in different dialects. Different races of killer whales also don't interbreed, which means transients and residents haven't bred for a very long time. But that only applies to wild killer whales. They are also the world's largest dolphin.
Another odontocete, the sperm whale, may be more closely related to baleen whales. It was hunted for the spermaceti in its melon.

I'm just gonna drop this here.

Really? (seriously, not sarcastically.) I thought macrophytic algae were considered plants or protista. In order to be a zooid, the organism has to be an animal. Please explain. These classifications have changed so much since I last studied them.

The bryozoan zoids are spreading confusion, as per their evil plan....

Yes, "marcophytic algae" are by definition multicellular and photosynthesising plants that don't have the special features of land plants. Some or all of them may well have zooid cells. I'm not sure. Moss does (it has swimming "sperm") but that's a land plant.

The "zooids" in a bryozoan colony are multicellular animals, and don't move around in the colony unlike zooid cells. Interesting to hear that some of them are specialised for different tasks. Which is kind of like the different cell types in a sponge. The specialised sponge cells aren't called "zooids" though...

To add to the confusion, there are two different phylums of "bryozoans" which may or not be related. Phylums "Ectoprocta" and "Entoprocta" are similar mats of little filter-feeding zooids. But the life-cycles and the anatomy of the zooids is different. Ectoprocta were the first discovered. There seems to be some debate as to whether Entoprocts still get to be called "bryozoans." or not.