The marine sponge Halisarca caerulea takes up about two-thirds of its body weight in dissolved carbon each day by filtering massive amounts of water, but it barely grows in size.
To work out where the carbon is going, Jasper De Goeij of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research in Texel and his colleagues collected the sponges from a coral reef (pictured, above) off the Caribbean island of Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles and stained them with chemicals that reveal actively dividing and dying cells.
They found that some of the sponge's cells divide about every five hours — remarkably fast for a multicellular organism. Most of these fast-dividing cells were from the sponge's filtering chambers. The researchers did not observe much cell death but found that the creatures shed huge amounts of these cells, resulting in the conversion of dissolved carbon into a food source for other reef organisms.
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Marine ecology: Speedy sponge. Nature 462, 255 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/462255b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/462255b
