sponges body structure sponges how do they move

In Arctic glass sponges take the title of the oldest living animal with an estimated lifespan of 15,000 years. What they lack in complexity and backbone is made up for tenfold in diversity of shape, color, and its success as an organism that has managed to survive major changes to Earth’s environment, mass explosions both literally and in the form of diversity of life, mass extinctions, mass warming’s and cooling, and all this time they’ve just been kicking it-unaware unphased persistent some individuals have even borne witness to some of these changes in their own lifetime. And they’ve been around for 600 million years. They don’t move as adults, but that doesn’t stop them from finding ways to get around anyway. Some have glass skeletons, some have skeletons made of Tums. There are 10,000 species distributed nearly pole to pole in both marine freshwater environments.

They can reproduce both sexually and asexually. They don’t need a brain, a stomach, a heart or any other organ for that matter, and nothing to ask the Wizard of Oz for. Most filter feed though some are carnivorous.

But this means that some species such as freshwater sponge, Ephydatia fluviatilis, can be pushed through a cheesecloth or seive, and the individual cells will find each other come back together again and make a new sponge… like, like a Backstreet Boys reunion tour or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Their cells are clumped together and not organized in a tissue, something we’ll get into more in a moment. For most sponges conjure up thoughts of a certain individual who lives in a pineapple under the sea, cleaning products, loofahs, or something they’ve seen in a beach gift shop (maybe cake if you’re hungry enough), but sponges are so much more fascinating than that. Porifera comes from the Latin porus for pore and ferre to bear. Today, we begin with the phylum Porifera. Once we’re done with those nine, we’ll move on to some of the more obscure because there is more than nine. And in this series, we’re focusing in on nine phyla of the kingdom Animalia.

But the point is, is that a phylum is a secondary classification of life. Some of them are more appropriate than others. What is the phylum? You might remember that from school: Kingdom phylum, class, order, family, genus, species? There’s a lot of ways of remembering that order.

Sponges body structure sponges how do they move