I got lots of photos “before” and “after” of the Denver area snows, as well as “before” and “after” of Cabot area snows and though it was raining when I got up, by the time I headed out for Walmart, it had turned to snow, and was coming down hard and fast.
I followed Utah’s contribution to the international highway system all the way to Walmart, but on the way home, it wasn’t quite so easy. I came by the back way, but the pavement and the gravel aren’t that easy to distinguish, since its not a major road.
There is a house with blue Christmas lights on it’s eaves, just before I make the turn to get back onto the main highway, and last week they weren’t on. This week, they were, and I was never so grateful to see anything in a long time!
Coming in on State Street wasn’t that easy, either, but I managed to ride the outer lines of the turn lane all the way in. I guess if I had thought about it, I could have waited until tomorrow, but I was out of Stuff.
Today’s special animal friends are the Hexactinellid sponges or “glass sponges,” a living animal made of glass. If you were paying close attention yesterday, you would have noticed that the poisonous spines on our plant friend, the Australian stinging tree, are also made of silica. Life is weird, huh? Sponges are very ancient animals belonging to the Kingdom Animalia and the Phylum Porifera (Greek for “full of holes”), but some scientists are now proposing that the silicate sponges should be in their own phylum, “Symplasma.”
Glass sponges are found in all the world’s oceans, but they are most common in the Antarctic and Northern Pacific waters. They are typically found at depths from 1,400 to 3,000 feet. These sponges are from 4 to 12 inches high. Some, however, can be over 3 feet long. Their skeletons are made up of 4-pointed or 6-pointed silicate “spicules,” which form a cup-shaped, usually symmetrical structure. Much of the body is composed of syncitial tissue, extensive regions of multinucleate cytoplasm. In particular, the epidermal cells characteristic of other sponges are absent, being replaced by a syncitial net of amoebocytes, through which the spicules penetrate. Unlike other sponges, they do not possess the ability to contract.
One species is the Venus’s Flower Basket, Euplectella aspergillum, which is found in deep Pacific waters near the Philippine Islands. Its six-pointed spicules look like jacks or caltrops. These microscopic spicules weave together in a very fine mesh in the following manner: “The body is perforated by numerous apertures, which are not true ostia but simply parietal gaps. A syconoid type of canal system is present, where ostia communicate with incurrent canals, which communicate with radial canals through prosopyles which, in turn, open into the spongocoel and to the outside through the osculum.” They can form “sponge reefs,” like coral reefs only made of glass.
Using this system of glass and cytoplasm, the sponge filters plankton from the water. Some scientists believe the glass sponge uses bioluminescence to attract plankton. Venus’s flower basket sometimes has a symbiotic relationship with a type of shrimp, Spongicolidae. A breeding pair of these shrimp will live permanently inside the sponge, from which they cannot escape because they are too large. Perhaps because of the “undying love” (weird anthropomorphism ...) of these shrimp, the Venus’s flower basket sponge is a symbol of love in Japan, and the sponges are collected as wedding gifts.
Scientists and engineers are studying the structures of glass sponges for a variety of uses. Structural engineers are interested in the complex lattices formed from the six- or eight-pointed spicules. Fiber-optics researchers are studying the ways the sponges build the silicate fibers. Some species extract silicic acid from seawater, convert it to silica, and then form the fibers and construct the skeleton. The orange puffball sponge, Tethya aurantium, produces glass biologically.
I confess that I copied several parts of this item straight from the articles, because I have no idea what it means. There are probably lectures on YouTube explaining it all with pictures, and I encourage everyone to explore these astounding creatures in greater depth.