Lauren Olinger has spent more than two years researching several species of the most common sponges in the Caribbean that now thrive on the reef.
What she has discovered is that sponges with an abundance of microbes, or tiny living things too small to be seen by the unaided eye, “take up” significant amounts of compounds versus sponges that have a low abundance of microbes.
Lauren Olinger
“From the compounds that these species were taking up, a lot of them were organohalides, so that means that they had halogen in them,” Olinger said in a recent telephone interview. “It’s interesting that an animal could use something that’s halogenated. These compounds can be really toxic. They can also include contaminants so there’s some interesting consequences there and it might tell us something about what these compounds are being used for.”