Flesh-eating sponges discovered in the Pacific Ocean are able to trap fish with hooks, where the prey animals are slowly digested.
Lonny Lundsen, of the Monterey Bay Area Research Institute (MBARI) discovered the four new species of meat-eating sponges.
Sponges are usually filter feeders, which capture bacteria and single-celled organisms using long cells called choancytes. These tiny tendrils use lots of energy.
These meat-eating sponges use hooks, resembling hairs, to hook onto marine animals, and draw them into the sponge. Fish, eels and crustaceans can all fall victim to the flesh-eating sponges. Once captured, the trapped prey is completely surrounded by sponge cells within hours. The seafood dinner is then slowly digested over the course of several days. When the sponge finishes its meal, only an empty shell remains.
"[F]ood is hard to come by in the deep sea. So these sponges trap larger, more nutrient-dense organisms, like crustaceans, using beautiful and intricate microscopic hooks," Lundsten told the press.
Asbestopluma monticola was first collected from an extinct volcano off the Central California coast called the Davidson Seamount. In Latin, monticola means "Mountain dweller." Asbestopluma rickettsi, was named after Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist immortalized in Cannery Road. Cladorhiza caillieti was found in volcanic flows off the coast of Vancouver Island. A newly-discovered hydrothermal vent field off the tip of Baja California is home to Cladorhiza evae.
Asbestopluma rickettsi comes "from a chemosynthetic environment that appears to be using methane-oxidizing bacteria as a nutrient source. In fact, three of the four species described here were found in chemosynthetic habitats," researchers wrote.
Carniverous sponges were first discovered 20 years ago. From that time until the latest discoveries, only seven species of the odd lifeforms were known to exist.
The newly-discovered sponge species are more like plants than traditional sponges. Several carniverous plants are known, including venus fly traps and pitcher plants.
"Numerous additional carnivorous sponges from the Northeast Pacific (which have been seen and collected by the authors) await description, and many more, likely, await discovery," researchers wrote in a press release.
Like these strange carniverous sponges, venus fly traps trap prey (usually insects) and digest them slowly in a bath of digestive juices. Pitcher plants have hairs like the newly-discovered sponges. However, in pitcher plants, these fine hairs give way, causing an insect to fall into a small pool of acid, which dissolves the tiny creature.
Video of the carniverous sponges was released by the MBARI.
Discovery of the new species was detailed in the journal Zootaxa.
