It’s the first time that scientists have found an animal that eats fossils
In the ice-covered central Arctic Ocean, far from any coastline, food on the ground is hard to find. When scientists take core samples of the seafloor here, which can lie more than 2.5 miles below the surface, they typically pull up muck that supports few, if any, organisms visible to the naked eye.
The discovery left the researchers with a burning question: What in the world were these sponges eating? In an area seemingly devoid of food, “it was absolutely not clear how they could grow to that density,” Boetius says. . “The finding that sponges use food sources that other organisms cannot is very cool,” says marine ecologist Jasper de Goeij of the University of Amsterdam, who was not involved in the study. “And it corroborates earlier findings that the symbiosis with bacteria allows huge flexibility in acquiring food.
“There are gardens of similar sponges in more southerly Norwegian waters,” he says. “So possibly, larvae came across from there.” Some lucky ones, adrift on the current, must have gotten stuck on the summit, where they found an unexpected profusion of food. These sponges can harbor small animals like shrimps, they learned, which probably feed on their leftovers—and the occasional mouthful of sponge. Sea stars, too, eat dying sponges.
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