A vast community of deep-sea sponges, the densest found in the Arctic, is consuming the remains of an ancient ecosystem to survive.
, live between 700 and 1,000 meters down in the central Arctic Ocean, where there are virtually no currents to provide food, and sea ice covers the water year-round. What’s more, sponges are largely immobile, yet in 2021 researchers, including Teresa Morganti, a marine biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany,
Carbon and nitrogen isotopes — atoms with different numbers of neutrons — in the sponge tissues closely matched those of the dead matter below, suggesting the animals were consuming it. The The matted layer is up to 15 centimeters thick in places, the researchers found. Assuming that the layer is, on average, greater than 4 centimeters thick, it could provide almost five times the carbon that the sponges would need to survive, the team calculates.
Radiocarbon dating showed the adult sponges — spread across more than 15 square kilometers on the peaks of an underwater volcanic mountain range — to be over 300 years old on average, a “truly outstanding” finding, says Paco Cardenas, a sponge expert at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved with the new study. “We expected sponges to grow very slowly, but this had never been measured in the deep sea,” he says.
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