MIAMI — There’s a turf war going under the warm waters off the Florida Keys, a battle for no less than dominance of dying coral reef tracts.
It’s sponge vs. seaweed, a matchup that for obvious reasons hasn’t generated much attention. With the competitors lacking charisma, claws, teeth, spines, fins, legs or any mobility whatsoever, this struggle is slow, painfully so. But scientists running a long-term monitoring program call its outcome crucial to an array of fish, lobster and other reef denizens.
So far, sponges, particularly the Caribbean barrel variety that can grow larger than a backyard hot tub, are edging out macroalgae, commonly known as seaweed. That’s about the only bright side to the dismal decline of corals from Biscayne Bay to the Bahamas and throughout the broader Caribbean basin.
Better sponges than seaweed
“If you can’t have coral, better that you should have sponges rather than macroalgae,” said Joseph Pawlik, a marine biologist and co-leader of a team from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington that wrapped up a 10-day underwater research mission to Conch Reef off Islamorada on Aug. 18.
Macroalgae — which comprises a variety of marine plants — isn’t good for much more than grazing for parrotfish and other algae-eating species, Pawlik said. “They’re food for fish, but otherwise they flop around” and provide no habitat for reef dwellers.
Large barrel sponges, on the other hand, offer food and some of the shelter that elk horn, brain and other large hard coral once provided and also help keep those famously crystal waters of the Keys clear.
Barrels, which range in size from thimbles to garbage cans on Conch Reef but can reach small swimming pool dimensions in deeper waters, feed by filtering nutrients, plankton and other things. They do it relentlessly, pumping 100 times their volume every hour — thousands of gallons a day for a garbage-can-sized specimen, said Christopher Finelli, a UNC-Wilmington marine biologist and research team co-leader.
‘Cool energy machines’
“They’re really cool little pumps, really cool energy machines,” Finelli said. “That’s what they do, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Finelli spoke from the Aquarius Reef Base, the world’s only undersea research station, which scientists and graduate students from UNC-Wilmington have used to study sponges on nearby Conch Reef since 1997. The facility, permanently moored some 60 feet down off Islamorada, is maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Over those 13 years, the changes the scientists have seen to corals near the Aquarius have been dramatic and largely discouraging. Like other reefs in the Keys, Conch’s once-impressive pillars of corals have either died off or been stunted under the siege of diseases, bleaching, rising sea temperatures, anchor damage and other stressors. Scientists estimate coral coverage has declined by an estimated 90 percent in less than a half-century.
Sponges, meanwhile, have expanded their territory and numbers, with the population on Conch growing by 40 percent since 2000, Pawlik said. They have easily supplanted corals as the prime habitat for reef dwellers in the Keys and many areas, Pawlik said. “Most of our research sites look like gardens of sponges,” he said.
The spread may be yet another hurdle for efforts to restore coral reefs because sponges sometimes move in at the expense of surviving corals, which must compete for space and sunlight on reefs. Some sponge species can overgrow corals and others can break down the limestone of dead corals, the ancient bones that living reefs are built on.
But the spread of the large barrel sponge, which can live 2,000 years and grow to massive size that has earned it the title “redwood of the deep,” does offer hope that an alternative habitat will survive on the reef tracts in the future, the UNC-Wilmington team said.
‘Advantageous’ sponge
For instance, the phenomenon of ocean acidification, which many scientists consider a ripple effect of climate changes as seas absorb more and more carbon dioxide, represents the next and potentially fatal threat to corals. Research suggests the chemical changes can cause corals, shellfish and other organisms to calcify, leaving their protective shells brittle and weak.
Sponges are less likely to be affected by those changes, Pawlik said. “Sponges may be in an advantageous situation.”
