Animal or vegetable?

At first glance this looks like a piece of seaweed thrown up onto the beach. It isn't, it is a colony of Flustra foliacea, a tiny animal that belongs to an ancient and primitive Phylum of animals known formally as the Bryozoa or commonly as Moss Animals. Colonies are found in the sub-tidal zone of the ocean where they form bushy colonies with stiff brown or light grey fronds attached firmly to stones and shells by by an encursting basal portionof the colony. Rather bizarrely fresh colonies have a distinctive smell of lemons!

Each animal within the colony is known as a zooid. The founding zooid (known as the ancestrula) develops into a young colony, and later into an adult colony through asexual budding. Sexually produced embryos are brooded within the adult colony, before larvae are released into the water column. Larvae settle onto the seabed after liberation and metamorphose into an ancestrula, and then go on to found a new colony.

Like all bryozoans, F. foliacea is a suspension feeder, feeding on small phytoplankton using its ciliated tentacles.

If you look through the naturalist's lens then you can just about make out the individual zooids.