Plants That are Animated

Among the curiosities often sold in American stores are so-called “air plants”—plants that will grow on air alone without sunshine or water. This is true, after a fashion. The “plants” actually are dried skeletons of marine animals. They belong to the group which includes the jellyfish, sea anemones and corals. Their skeletons have a striking resemblance to plants.

The species most commonly sold is sea moss or Neptune’s fern, an animal abundant in the North Atlantic, especially in the English channel and the Gulf of Maine. A closely related species, the “squirrel’s tail,” is abundant in the eastern Pacific where its silvery colonies often are washed ashore by storms. Dry beach material of these colonies is easily collected, dyed and sold as Christmas decorations.

“These are colonial forms consisting of thousands of individual animals,” according to the Chicago Museum of Natural History. “Colonies of two species of sea squirrel may be twelve inches or more long. Those of some species may be several feet in length. Usually they are attached to rocks or other substrata by a rootlike base, from which spring the delicate branched stems bearing hundreds of minute polyps.

“Most of these are hydranths (feeding polyps) that capture microscopic organisms. The reproductive polyps are less common, usually larger, and different in shape. The common stem is made up of external non-cellular material, mostly yellowish or brown in color.”