Sponges Recycle Carbon to Give Life to Coral Reefs

This Tuesday, I watched a video about recycle carbon, and it can give life to coral reefs.I didn't understand the video at first, so I looked some informations online.It's hard to think of a sponge as an animal, especially if you have a dried up non-synthetic one in your bathtub. Living sponges don't have circulatory, digestive or nervous systems, and they can often regenerate themselves from small fragments. But sponges are indeed in the kingdom Animalia and, as this report from The Company of Biologists explains, they are critical to the survival of coral reefs.Coral reefs support some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, yet they thrive in a marine desert it is fascinated by the energy budgets that support coral reefs in this impoverished environment.Sponges grow in the deep dark cavities beneath reefs, and 90% of their diet is composed of dissolved organic carbon, which is inedible for most other reef residents.Some reserchers had to find out where the carbon was going to back up his measurements. Essentially, the sponges recycle carbon that would otherwise be lost to the reef.They knew that they had seen some loose cells, and thought that they were artifacts from cutting the samples, but when they went back and looked at the samples, they realized that choanocytes were shedding all over the place. And then De Goeij remembered the tiny piles of brown material he found next to the sponges in the aquarium every morning.