Saturday 15 January 2011

Weird-creature Ping-pong tree sponge.

Weird creature of the day is the so-called "ping-pong tree sponge":
Chlondrocladia lampadiglobus, which was featured in the November/December Issue of American Scientist, but, according to wikipedia, discovered back in 2006, by Jean Vacelet. This bizarre creature is carnivorous, as are all the sponges in the genus Chlondrocladia, which is a very unusual adaptation in sponges, which are generally filter feeders. In a recent paper, Prof. Vacelet and colleague Michelle Kelly, suggested that this carnivorous feeding habit had evolved in this group of deep sea sponges in response to the "difficult conditions of [their] deep sea environment".


http://madethere.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/mbari_chondrocladia_72.jpg

The American Scientist article was called "An Empire Lacking Food" ( volume 98 number 6, pages 470-477). There is a blog-post with a photo of the pingpong tree sponge on the American Scientist website [here], although there is an error in the post (bioluminescence is very common in sea creatures, especially, deep sea ones, but it is not really "the norm", as the article says).

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