Day 195

Day 195

 

Guess what the longest living creature on earth is…

I wouldn’t have thought that the oldest animal on earth would be a sponge…specifically, the glass sponge, who can live for up to 15,000 years.

Glass sponges have been on earth more than 570 million years, before the dinosaurs. They make their homes deep beneath the ocean’s surface, attaching to the sea floor. As they grow, the sponges connect to and gain support from one another, creating strong configurations known as reefs. These glass-house structures grow as tall as 6 stories and serve as homes for other ocean creatures. They are so strong that after the sponges die, their skeletons remain intact. The skeleton of a glass sponge in the East China Sea is believed to be 11,000.

They were believed to go go extinct about 40 million years ago. Then in 1987, a team of scientists discovered a living glass sponge reef on the ocean floor of the Hecate Strait in Canada.

They were the first humans to see a living glass sponge reef and considered the discovery of the 9,000 year old reefs akin to “finding a herd of dinosaurs wandering around on land.” Before this, they were only ever seen in the fossil cliffs of Europe—an ancient stretch of fossilized reef considered to be the largest known animal-made structure ever created.

One glass sponge found by researchers in Antarctica’s Ross Sea, is thought to be the oldest living animal on the planet.

The glass sponge in the photo is a species of Euplectella found in the Gulf of Mexico. Commonly called the “Venus flower basket,” this sponge builds its skeleton in a way that entraps a certain species of crustacean inside for life.

 

https://oceanconservancy.org/blog/2023/11/21/what-glass-sponge

https://www.ifaw.org/ca-en/journal/animals-longest-lifespans

 

 

Back to blog