![]() They also spotted several unusual brown trails following behind the invertebrates, suggesting that these Arctic sponges are capable of crawling around the seafloor, the team reported in a new research paper.Ī figure from the research paper shows typical sponge spicule trails. ![]() There, they discovered one of the most densely populated groups of sponges ever seen. In 2016, a group of researchers onboard the icebreaker research vessel Polarstern used towed cameras to capture video footage of the seafloor at Langseth Ridge - a poorly studied region of the Arctic Ocean that's permanently covered in sea ice - at a depth of between 2,300 and 3,300 feet (700 to 1,000 meters). Scientists had long assumed that these colonial animals - which form dense, yet porous, skeletons on the seafloor - were sedentary and incapable of moving around, although some encrusting sponges that grow around rocks achieve limited mobility by remodeling their bodies in a sliding fashion. The expedition involved mapping the seafloor and explorations of deep-sea coral sponge communities, fish habitats and the ecosystems of seamounts, which are underwater mountains.Sponges are one of the oldest animal groups found on Earth, dating back around 600 million years to the Precambrian period. ![]() The find was part of NOAA's North Atlantic Stepping Stones, a monthlong expedition on the Okeanos Explorer to collect information about unknown and poorly understood deep-water areas off the eastern U.S. The expedition was more than 200 miles off the Atlantic coast when the now-famous sponge and starfish were sighted. The expedition was exploring the depths of the Atlantic Patrick's anatomy is not exactly faithful to that of a real starfish, either. But actual deep-sea sponges? "They're almost surreal. "SpongeBob is obviously shaped like a plastic cleaning sponge - he's rectangular," Mah says. While the real-life sponge is as yellow as the Nickelodeon character, SpongeBob's shape is far from what's found in nature. ![]() Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Nickelodeon Patrick and SpongeBob are not anatomically correct starfish and sponges. ![]()
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