Sea sponges also 'sneeze' to get rid of mucus: they do this at regular intervals in order to clean up the channels through which they filter the water to feed.
The mucus serves to trap and facilitate the expulsion of waste substances, and in turn it becomes food for other marine organisms.
It was discovered by a group of researchers led by Niklas Kornder of the University of Amsterdam.
The study is published in the journal Current Biology.
"
The sneeze of a sponge
is not exactly the same as a human sneeze, because it
lasts about half an hour
, but they are really comparable - says Kornder - because sneezing is for both sponges and humans a mechanism that serves to
get rid of the waste
".
This system may be one of the oldest in the world, considering that sea sponges have been around for over 650 million years.
While they may appear to be simple organisms, they play a crucial role in many marine ecosystems: they feed by pumping water through a network of inlet and outlet channels, and thus filter up to thousands of liters of seawater every day. , managing to feed on the organic matter dissolved in it.
By filming sponges (the Caribbean
Aplysina archeri
and the Indo-Pacific
Chelonaplysilla
) in an aquarium, the researchers observed that "
every 3-8 hours
they contracted and then relaxed their surface tissues," explains Kornder.
“At first we thought it was an image focus problem, but then we realized they were 'sneezing'.
The footage showed that with each sneeze the collected mucus was released and the sponge remained with the clean surface.
The timelapses also showed that mucus was continually being expelled from the inflow openings, not the outflow openings, and transported slowly along distinct paths to central collection points on the sponge surfaces. "During some dives in the Caribbean, the researchers then observed that several marine organisms fed on this mucus.
