Also like corals, glass sponges grow slowly. ![]() As they die, they leave behind silica mats meters deep on the seafloor, providing prime substrate for crinoids, anemones, and other sponges to settle and grow. Their basket-like inner cavities are rare nurseries in the cold water, and small marine isopods, juvenile starfish, brittle stars, and even fish eggs have been found inside. Like corals, glass sponges provide habitat for many other organisms. Glass sponges are the architects of the most diverse community on the seafloor under ice shelves. “The idea that they could recruit and grow rapidly when these ice shelves break up is exciting, and suggests that the seafloor is going to change more quickly than we imagined.” “These things aren’t as unexciting as we thought they are actually very dynamic,” says polar ecologist James McClintock of the University of Alabama, who was not involved in the research. ![]() The collapse of ice shelves in the Antarctic over the past two decades due to warmer waters bathing their undersides has already changed seawater conditions enough to allow typically slow-growing communities of glass sponges to sprout up under the more transient sea ice that has replaced the shelf. But under the right conditions, seafloor life on Antarctia’s continental shelf can grow very quickly, according to new research published today in Current Biology. When most people think about organisms growing on the seafloor around Antarctica (if they think of them at all), a few short words come to mind: cold, slow, and dull.
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