The sponge tissue occasionally contracted and pushed these clumps into the surrounding water. The snot came out of the creatures’ ostia, traveled along defined paths on the surface of the sponge-or “mucus highways”-and accumulated in string-like clumps. The team recorded time-lapse videos of mucus expelled from Caribbean sponge Aplysina archeri, called a stove-pipe sponge for its tube-like shape, and another Indo-Pacific species of the genus Chelonaplysilla. But both sponge and human sneezes exist as a waste disposal mechanism.”
A sponge sneeze takes about half an hour to complete. “Let’s be clear: Sponges don’t sneeze like humans do. “Our data suggest that sneezing is an adaptation that sponges evolved to keep themselves clean,” says Jasper de Goeij, a marine biologist at the University of Amsterdam and the paper’s senior author, in a statement. In a new study published in Current Biology, researchers found that sponges slowly eject mucus through their seawater inlet pores, called ostia, to get rid of unwanted particles. This behavior was long known to scientists, but exactly how it happened remained a mystery, until now. Despite lacking nerves, muscles or even brains, sea sponges have the ability to expel clumps of mucus from their bodies in a sneeze-like fashion.
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