MBARIThe sponge Asbestopluma monticola, collected in an extinct volcano on the California coastMBARI
It was big news for the marine biology community. Only seven species of carnivorous sponges were ever reported in the past twenty years. Now, all at once, researchers in the United States and Canada have presented four new species of these bizarre denizens of the ocean floor (Zootaxa, April 2014). These sponges, found along the Pacific coast, are covered in microscopic hair-like hooks that capture crustaceans and other small organisms. Within a few hours, the cells of the sponge start digesting their prey. After a few days, all that’s left is an empty carcass. Biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California filmed and collected the sponges from the ocean floor. Then, in the laboratory, they found numerous crustaceans at varying stages of decomposition in the “hair” of two sponge species: Cladorhiza caillieti and Cladorhiza evae. Sponges normally feed by filtering bacteria and other microorganisms from the seawater. This is not the case for the new species, some of them full of spicules, like Asbestopluma rickettsi, found among communities of mollusks and worms in Southern California, and others spicule-free like Asbestopluma monticola, collected for the first time in an extinct volcano on the California coast.
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