The polyps may be solitary, or form colonies, which may be of the spreading or encrusting type, or arborescent, and then always of monopodial growth and budding.
Trophosome encrusting with hydranths of Bougainvillea-type, polyps differentiated into blastostyles, gastrozoids and dactylozoids; gonosome free medusae or gonophores.
At low tide the limpet (being a strictly intertidal organism) is exposed to the air, and (according to trustworthy observers) quits its attachment and walks away in search of food (minute encrusting algae), and then once more returns to the identical spot, not an inch in diameter, which belongs, as it were, to it.
In the encrusting type, which is found in a large proportion of the genera, the zooids are usually in a single layer, with their orifices facing away from the substratum; but in certain species the colony becomes multilaminar by the continued superposition of new zooids over the free surfaces of the older ones, whose orifices they naturally occlude.
These are probably important in checking overgrowth by encrusting organisms, and in particular by preventing larvae from fixing on the zoarium.
