The discovery left the researchers with a burning question: What in the world were these sponges eating? In an area seemingly devoid of food, “it was absolutely not clear how they could grow to that density,” Boetius says.
Yet when the scientists returned to the same spot in 2016 with lights and cameras, they found the area-at the top of an extinct submarine volcano, known as a seamount-almost entirely covered in sponges. What a coincidence, we thought, to hit a sponge.” “In this area, you’d have maybe one sponge every square kilometer or so. What looked like white fur, recalls marine biologist Antje Boetius, of Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute, was an almost equally surprising piece of sea sponge. Yet in 2011, one such sample appeared to contain, in the words of the student who first saw it, “a polar bear!” When scientists take core samples of the seafloor here, which can lie more than 2.5 miles below the surface, they typically pull up muck that supports few, if any, organisms visible to the naked eye. In the ice-covered central Arctic Ocean, far from any coastline, food on the ground is hard to find.
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