There, they discovered one of the most densely populated groups of sponges ever seen. In 2016, a group of researchers onboard the icebreaker research vessel Polarstern used towed cameras to capture video footage of the seafloor at Langseth Ridge - a poorly studied region of the Arctic Ocean that's permanently covered in sea ice - at a depth of between 2,300 and 3,300 feet (700 to 1,000 meters). Scientists had long assumed that these colonial animals - which form dense, yet porous, skeletons on the seafloor - were sedentary and incapable of moving around, although some encrusting sponges that grow around rocks achieve limited mobility by remodeling their bodies in a sliding fashion. Sponges are one of the oldest animal groups found on Earth, dating back around 600 million years to the Precambrian period.
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