”Go over your qualifications, again, for me.”
Posted on 02/09/2022 2:08:42 PM PST by BenLurkin
Sponges are predominantly filter feeders, and are crucial to nutrient recycling throughout the oceans. The existence of this colony, discovered by a research ship in 2016, however, has been an enigma.
The sponges, which include the species Geodia parva, G. hentscheli and Stelletta rhaphidiophora, live between 700 and 1,000 meters down in the central Arctic Ocean, where there are virtually no currents to provide food, and sea ice covers the water year-round. What’s more, sponges are largely immobile, yet in 2021 researchers, including Teresa Morganti, a marine biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, reported that these ones slowly move, using their spicules — microscopic skeletal structures — and leaving them as thick brown trails in their wake.
Carbon and nitrogen isotopes — atoms with different numbers of neutrons — in the sponge tissues closely matched those of the dead matter below, suggesting the animals were consuming it. The genetic signature of the microbes showed they had enzymes capable of breaking down the material and were likely dissolving the dead organic matter into food for the sponges.
The matted layer is up to 15 centimeters thick in places, the researchers found. Assuming that the layer is, on average, greater than 4 centimeters thick, it could provide almost five times the carbon that the sponges would need to survive, the team calculates.
The discovery that the sponges are feeding from below means they are likely moving to access more food, Morganti and colleagues suggest. The scientists also found many sponges to be budding, or breaking off parts to form new individuals, showing active reproduction.
Radiocarbon dating showed the adult sponges — spread across more than 15 square kilometers on the peaks of an underwater volcanic mountain range — to be over 300 years old on average...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Did the live in pineapples?
Fossil Fuel
They feed on Biden to survive ?
Can we get a load of sponges delivered to Congress and the White House as soon as possible?
Wait, will sponges feed on fossilized sponges?
I must have missed the news. When did the fossilized Pelosi, Biden, Schumer, and McConnell drown?
Cold, expired food. What a sad way of life.
Classically, sponges are colonies, not “individuals.”
Also, not sure fossilized is the right term.
Is this article written by a scientist or a “journalist”?
Crap. Beat me to it.
BS, why’s Pelosi sponge free?
I don’t know if anyone realizes how HUGE this is, if true. Sponges are both sessile (stationary), and believed to be from an early shoot off the animal family tree from WAY before 99% of the major animal groups split off. This seems to mean one of three things, any of which is astounding:
1) These sponges learned evolved to move and feed completely independent of all other forms of life.
2) Ancestral sponges aren’t nearly as primitive as we thought, and these sponges retained some basal trait of the ability to move which all other sponges lost.
3) Ancestral sponges are as primitive as we thought, but all the sessile sponges are from one branch of the sponge family tree, and we just found another super-ancient branch older than any other known branch of the animal family tree (except maybe cnidaria, the branch that includes jellyfish.)
Oh, and what the heck:
4) The sequential complication of animals is all just a giant mind-mess from God, and he finally decided to let us see something wacky to start revealing himself in the most unusual way.
What, you never survived a week at college on old pizza?
Sounds like my old college cafeteria menu.
He writes almost exclusively for far Left outlets. He has a degree in ‘Science Journalism’ AKA ‘green’ propaganda.
LOL. Soylent...gray.
”Go over your qualifications, again, for me.”
Thanks for the laughs.
Yup. And their best friends are starfish.
I never claimed any qualifications. I happen to have majored in biology, with a particular interest in morphology and phylogeny, but I’m not making any fantastic claims, rather merely posing the questions provoked by this discovery. I am, however, very puzzled by your pointlessly antagonistic post. I don’t know who you are, or why you’re such an ass, and I’m not sure if I remind you of someone, but as someone who saved myself until marriage, I can assure you I’ve had no sexual relations with your mother.
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