We need your financial support to make it happen – every contribution makes a difference. Science News reports on crucial research and discovery across science disciplines. Scientists and journalists share a core belief in questioning, observing and verifying to reach the truth. 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. 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. The sponges, which include the species Geodia parva, G. The existence of this colony, discovered by a research ship in 2016, however, has been an enigma. Sponges are predominantly filter feeders, and are crucial to nutrient recycling throughout the oceans. Scientists might not know about all of them because many places that sponges inhabit are really difficult to get to, he adds. Evolutionarily speaking, sponges “are more than 600 million years old, and they inhabit all parts of our globe,” he says. The study highlights just how opportunistic sponges are, says Jasper de Goeij, a deep-sea ecologist at the University of Amsterdam not involved with this work. In the cold, dark depths of the Arctic Ocean, a feast of the dead is under way.Ī vast community of sponges, the densest group of these animals found in the Arctic, is consuming the remains of an ancient ecosystem to survive, researchers report February 8 in Nature Communications.

Can sea sponges move?