Sponge spicule | Hacker News Reader

Sponge spicule

en.wikipedia.org

46 pointsperihelions8 comments

The fact that hawksbill turtles subsist largely off sponges is crazy (like eating a plate of broken glass): https://seaworld.org/animals/all-about/sea-turtles/diet/

Looks similar to caltrops and what was used for anti-tank strategies.

> Research on the Euplectella aspergillum (Venus' Flower Basket) demonstrated that the spicules of certain deep-sea sponges have similar traits to Optical fibre. In addition to being able to trap and transport light, these spicules have a number of advantages over commercial fibre optic wire. They are stronger, resist stress easier, and form their own support elements.

Gnarly!

These are crazy to see under a microscope. I keep a reef aquarium that at one point had a problem with dinoflagellants. I dosed silicates to induce a diatom bloom that out competes the dinoflagellants, and as a fun side effect saw a huge explosion in my sponge population.

Any time I'm sampling the water under the microscope, I see sponge spicules these days. Makes me happy.

These are times when I wish HN supported inline images.

I love this micro-structure sort of stuff. Another good one is nacre (aka "mother of pearl")[1], which is composed of microscopic hexagonal platelets, made from aragonite. Nanotechnology is pretty old and common tech, it seems; we just don't have a good handle on it ourselves, yet.

On a different note, one interesting theory is the "Clay origin of life"[2], where life began with non-organic crystal replication, and bootstrapped from there. Reminds me of the phrase "humans are the reproductive organs of machines". Maybe the crystals are the ones really driving the show, and we were just developed to help out (:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacre#Structure_and_appearance

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Clay

I would be interested in a program that attempts to geometric shapes from DNA code because this would allow investigating sponges and their evolution mathematically.

I'm not sure we are there yet, depends how modular the molecular machinery in the sclerocytes to create spicules is I suppose, but a lot of things in nature only emerge from higher order interactions. A very simple example is that bees never sought to build hexagonal comb. We already investigate evolution mathematically straight from the code, which obviates assumption of selective pressures acting on spicules morphology. It could be an interesting approach though and allow testing of hypotheses about biomechanics etc.

The structural/pattern variety and complexity even of non-living natural things is overwhelming:

"Types of Silicates Part 1: Orthosilicates, Disilicates, and Cyclosilicates" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryNQBxmcOu8&list=PLybg94GvOJ...

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