April 15, 2021, by admin

Today, rather than a specific animal for a creature feature, we will look at a whole group…sea sponges, phylum Porifera.  Sponges are thought to be one of the oldest and simplest animal groups, being multicellular but lacking tissues or organs.  Their body is covered by a one cell thick skin covered in small pores, with a few larger openings.  They are filter feeders, pulling water into a series a channels where specialized feeding cells, called choanocytes, filter out organic matter as food.  There are only a few animals worldwide that eat sponges, including the Hawksbill sea turtle, some nudibranchs, and a few species of tropical fishes. 

The pictured sponge was brought in to SSSC by Wendy Alderson, whose husband brought it up on a longline.  While we are having difficulty identifying the exact species, we are pretty sure it belongs to the group Hexactinellid, or glass sponges (though we are not experts, so if anyone has insight into this species, we would love to hear it).