Global warming threatens to put many species on thin ice. But changing temperatures seem to have sparked new life in a group of Antarctic sea sponges.
Glass sponges, or hexactinellids, normally grow incredibly slowly, sometimes locked in arrested growth for decades. When the Larsen A ice shelf, which stretches above a colony of glass sponges, collapsed in 1995, no one predicted that they would respond with a massive growth spurt.
It looks like the sponges benefited from a feeding frenzy. The disintegration of the ice shelf over 2000 square kilometres let the sunlight in underwater, prompting a boom of phytoplankton, one of the sponges' favourite foods.
Researchers visiting the area in 2011 were surprised to find the forest of sponges in the photo above. They found that glass sponges had doubled in biomass and tripled in population since the last look four years earlier.
Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.05.051
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
Have your say
Only subscribers may leave comments on this article. Please log in.
Only personal subscribers may leave comments on this article
All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.
If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.
