Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
“In my case - I believe that my corals and water movement function as a living filter for all free swimming organisms”Other may - but I do not have insight in this. But in general - if there is living or new organic matter - there is probably some organism that have learned to get the needed carbon from them.
In my case - I believe that my corals and water movement function as a living filter for all free swimming organisms
Sincerely Lasse
Click to expand...
I haven't been able to find any info indicating that they eat dinoflagellates (which is actually kind of surprising to me), but they do eat diatoms, bacteria, and even viruses.*I think sponges eat dinos.
Considering what I know about Sponge Bob’s diet. I think sponges eat dinos.
“In my case - I believe that my corals and water movement function as a living filter for all free swimming organisms”
@Lasse
Lets expand corals to include diverse filter feeders:
https://www.coris.noaa.gov/activities/resourceCD/resources/sponge_lp.pdf
This does not detail what marine sponges capture, but it is good science on how sponges process carbon in marine food webs.
A Multi-Species Investigation of Sponges’ Filtering Activity towards Marine Microalgae
Chronic discharge of surplus organic matter is a typical side effect of fish aquaculture, occasionally leading to coastal eutrophication and excessive phytoplankton growth. Owing to their innate filter-feeding capacity, marine sponges could mitigate environmental ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
This gets into what sponges remove from the marine “food web”.
Sponges (Porifera), the oldest extant filter-feeding macroinvertebrates [7], have recently been viewed as promising candidates for IMTA scenarios [8,9] due to their capability to filter large volumes of water [10,11,12] and retain microorganisms or other particles of various sizes, ranging from 0.1 to 50 μm [13,14,15], with high efficiency (75–99%) [11,14,16,17]. Having developed intricate patterns of symbiotic associations with microbial communities, sponges are among the most diverse and complex holobionts in the marine environment [18] and possess unique feeding mechanisms. Associated microbiomes render sponges capable of distinct nutritional strategies that extend beyond the standard heterotrophy described above. Hence, depending on the species and environmental parameters, sponges can benefit from photosynthesis [17], or feed on dissolved organic matter (DOM) [19]. In addition to these appealing characteristics, sponges do sustain a “gold mine” of bioactive compounds with pharmaceutical [20] and cosmetic potential [21], while the biomass of some species can be exploited for the production of bath sponges [22]. By offering several valorization opportunities, cultivation of sponges can become an extra source of profit for fish farmers and, thus, their inclusion in IMTA systems is rather tempting