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YouTube video by Waterlust

YouTube video by Waterlust

Happy Fieldwork Friday! This week, we are featuring some recent sponge research from the Fiore Marine Microbiology and Ecology Lab at @appstate 🪸Sponges and corals have coexisted on coral reefs for a very long time. Although corals might be the more charismatic of the duo, sponges are just as important to our coral reef ecosystems! Sponges provide food and shelter to many marine creatures, act as glue securing corals and rocks on the reef, and filter massive amounts of water (up to 1000 liters per hour per kilogram of sponge!), removing excess nutrients and harmful algae in the process.Although these two organisms have lived side by side for so long, we are just starting to understand the full scope of their relationship. We know sponges can consume nutrients released from corals and algae, but is this a one-sided exchange? Dr. Cara Fiore and her colleagues wanted to find out if the opposite occurs - do corals also consume nutrients from sponges?To test this hypothesis, the research team designed a lab experiment to find out. Sponges were fed a special food that contained a “tracer” heavy element that the team could follow. Once the sponges had taken in all the tracer and any excess was rinsed off, the tagged sponges were incubated in the same tank as some coral fragments from Mote’s Coral Nursery. Then it was time to wait and let the sponges do their thing - pumping water through their bodies, respiring, and releasing waste. Because the sponges would be the only source of the heavy tracer nutrients, if any were detected in the corals, then the team would know it came from the sponges.Their hard work paid off, and they were able to show for the first time that corals consumed nutrients from sponges! We often think of sponges and corals as competing for space on a reef, but seems like there may be more to this story….Check out the paper to learn more and follow the Fiore Lab as they expand on this groundbreaking work.fiorelabsymbiosis.orgReigel, Alicia M., et al. "Sponge exhalent metabolites influence coral reef picoplankton dynamics." Scientific Reports 14.1 (2024): 31394.

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