When most people think about organisms growing on the seafloor around Antarctica (if they think of them at all), a few short words come to mind: cold, slow, and dull. But under the right conditions, ...

Deep under the sea lies a creature that sort of looks like a ghostly tulip. The glass rope sponge has a cup-shaped, filter-feeding top and a thin anemone-covered stem tethering it to the ground. One ...

Scientists have discovered large colonies of glass sponges thriving on the seafloor 30 miles off the coast of Washington. The species of glass sponges capable of building reefs were thought extinct ...

Aquanautix is a PhD marine biologist interested in deep-sea exploration, science, education, and policy. For more posts like these see the new Aquanautix Blog, online since August 2010. Biomaterial ...

The other deeplings (except RickMac) are at the fantastic Science Online conference this week, meeting with other scientist communicators and hatching various plots for DSN’s ascendancy to world ...

It takes an experienced deep-water diver like Hamish Tweed to reach most of the glass sponge reefs. You have to descend more than 60 metres into the depths of B.C.'s Howe Sound where, even in the ...

Glass sponges are taking over a newly sunlit strip of Antarctic marine real estate at a blistering clip, surprising biologists who had no idea they had it in them. Glass sponges are taking over a ...

Quick adaptation In the freezing waters around Antarctica, pale sponges made of glass have spread rapidly across the seafloor as surface ice disappeared, German and Swedish researchers report. Glass ...

Sponges may conjure visions of the soft and squishy, but some of those living deep beneath the sea build complex glass structures that are marvels of engineering. The sponge, from the genus ...

The genome of a glass sponge species suggests that silica skeletons evolved independently in several groups of sponges. Researchers led by geobiologist Professor Gert Wörheide have decoded the genome ...