Twenty-three metres below the surface of Barkley Sound, a sea sponge named Belinda is telling researchers about changing ocean conditions.
“Honestly, it was very opportunistic,” Dominica Harrison, one of the study’s authors told Global News.
“They just turned on the cameras, and there Belinda was. Just hanging out.”
The study, published in the Marina Ecology Progress Series, looked at Belinda’s response to its changing environment and the rare footage was captured by Ocean Networks Canada over four years, making it the longest continuous recording of these animals in the wild.
Eight 3D cameras captured Belinda’s behaviour every hour, watching it feed, filter and in some cases sneeze for days on end to clear debris.
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“The biggest thing that we found is that sponges actually hibernate, like bears,” Harrison said.
Co-author Sally Leys with the University of Alberta added that Belinda would hibernate every winter.
“That’s what I find really cool because it tells you that it senses and responds to global cycles,” she said.
Belinda also reacted to the marine heat wave that raised surface sea temperatures off the west coast of North America between 2013 and 2016.
Footage showed Belinda darkening from a healthy pale orange and yellow to a deep orange while taking on a lumpy texture.
“It’s a question of how much stress can these animals take and how resilient are they,” Leys said.
“This one seems to be fairly resilient. A lot of things didn’t do well during that period, ‘Belinda’ came back.”
Researchers say that Belinda’s experience speaks to how the vital sedentary animals respond to changing ocean conditions with more long-term monitoring needed to better predict and protect them.
“If you see it’s active, then you would have a better understanding of why you would support caring for that environment,” Leys said.
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