![]() “I was surprised, but it was very clear,” study co-author Autun Purser, a marine ecologist at the Alfred Wegener Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, told Mongabay in an interview. These spicule trails were visible in about 70% of the images taken of the sea sponges, according to a paper recently published in Current Biology. It looked as if the sea sponges were moving. Underwater imagery showed trails of spicules – structural, skeleton-like spikes that sponges can shed – meandering along the seafloor. hentscheli, and Stelletta rhaphidiophora.īut the abundance of sponges wasn’t the biggest surprise. The main species in the region were identified as Geodia parva, G. ![]() The area was covered in large sea sponges, despite having lower productivity and nutrient fluxes than other sea sponge grounds in the North Atlantic Ocean. In 2016, a team of scientists aboard the RV Polarstern, a German research icebreaker, visited Langseth Ridge, an ice-covered seamount in the Arctic Ocean, a few hundred miles from the North Pole. But a new study has upended this assumption, and pushed and prodded scientific thought into a new direction. At least, that’s what a lot of people used to think about these aquatic invertebrates. Image: AWI OFOBS Team, PS101/Morganti et al Figure showing typical sponge spicule trails.
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