THE SEA SPONGE   

This is where I got most of my information.

This is a wiki link

This is a web link 

  This is a sea sponge.

Sea sponges are very simple animals that live on the ocean floor. They attach themselves permanently to an anchorage, and move sea water through their bodies, filtering out tiny organisms for food. The channels that the water flows through account for their hole-riddled structure, and is what makes their composition so useful. They are harvested by divers; sponge-diving has been a family tradition in many areas around the Meditteranean Sea and off the coast of Florida in the U.S. They have been used as cleaning tools for thousands of years.Unfortunately,some personal care companies do tout their bath sponges as being “sustainable,” .That said, we don’t seem to be in danger of over-harvesting: Synthetic sponges still dominate the market, and Florida, the nation’s largest supplier of sea sponges,currently produces about 60,000 pounds of sponges per year. That is an awful lot of sponges. That’s a mere tenth of what the state was producing before World War II. To tell you the truth,global warming is probably a much greater threat to the sponge than are beauty companies.

     This is a variety of sponges.

Sea sponges are some of the oldest and simplest multi-celled organisms on the planet. They live in almost every aquatic environment, filtering nutrients from the water through their pores. There are two methods for harvesting sea sponges: fishermen either dive for them, cutting them from the sea floor with knives, or they spot sponges from the surface of the water and tear them loose with long hooks. If enough of the sponge is left behind, it will regenerate itself. Cutting sponges increases the chance of survival, but the University of Florida estimates that even hooked sponges will grow back about a third of the time.

                                                                                      ENTERING THE PHOTO SPLASH!!!!!

This is a picture of a sponge as a cleaning tool.

                                   This is what a real sea sponge looks like.                                                 This is what a fake sea sponge looks like.

This is a purple tube sponge.  

 Sponges are the aquatic animal of the phylum Porifera, the domain, Eukaryota,and the kingdom, Animala. Sponges do not have nervous, digestive, and circulatory systems. It is thought that the sponge's closest single celled relative is the choanoflagellates. Sponges are known for regenerating from fragments that broke off. This only works if the fragments include the right types of cells.