Individual autozooidal behaviour and feeding in marine bryozoans

The article is devoted to individual behaviour of autozooids (mainly connected with feeding and cleaning) in 40 species and subspecies of marine bryozoans from the White Sea and the Barents Sea. We present comparative descriptions of the observations and for the first time describe some of autozooidal activities (e.g. cleaning of the colony surface by a reversal of tentacular ciliature beating, variants of testing-position, and particle capture and rejection). Non-contradictory aspects from the main hypotheses on bryozoan feeding have been used to create a model of feeding mechanism. Flicking activity in the absence of previous mechanical contact between tentacle and particle leads to the inference that polypides in some species can detect particles at some distance. The discussion deals with both normal and "spontaneous" reactions, as well as differences and similarities in autozooidal behaviour and their probable causes. Approaches to classification of the diversity of bryozoan behaviour (functional and morphological) are considered. Behavioural reactions recorded are classified using a morphological approach based on the structure (tentacular ciliature, tentacles and entire polypide) performing the reaction. We suggest that polypide protrusion and retraction might be the basis of the origin of some other individual activities. Individual autozooidal behaviour is considered to be a flexible and sensitive system of reactions in which the activities can be performed in different combinations and successions and can be switched depending on the situation.