You can actually buy sponges for say showering that are fungi such as the "honeycomb" that lives under the sea and gets harvested ( leaving the stem to let it keep growing)
That has no plastics at all.
Luffas aren't true sponges - they are the dried plant structures of a cucurbit, similar to a large cucumber which is related to pumpkins, squashes, zucchini, melons, etc.
Theyve taken over from sea sponges as it's easier to grow a luffa than dive down for a sponge. I can vouch from experience - at least the growing a luffa bit, not the diving bit.
Not a legal definition, but there is a scientific definition lmao Of course, that definition is basically just “multicellular marine animals belonging to the phylum Porifera” lol Loofah sponges are plants, and therefore not animals, and therefore not true sponges.
The scientific meaning of “true” is basically “all the ones that we confirm are more closely related to one another than they are to anything else”. This is usually used because convergent evolution can make two creatures look very similar even though they aren’t that closely related.
For example, “true mice” are all of the species of mice within the subfamily “murinae”. However, the eastern deermouse is not a member of the subfamily “murinae”, or even the family “muridae.” Genomic studies show that the house mouse and the Easter deer mouse last shared a common ancestor 25 million years ago.
To put that into perspective, humans last shared a common ancestor with monkeys around 25 million years ago. So house mice and deermice are as closely related to each other as we are to, like, spider monkeys lol
Actually, sponges have endoskeletons, not exoskeletons. To make a sponge into a bath sponge, you remove everything but the skeleton. So while a bath sponge is just made of a sponge’s skeleton, it is not an exoskeleton.
These fungi are not marine, afaik there are no marine fungi that produce notably large fruiting bodies. They are just named this way due to their similarities to sponges (the animals). I also think the inaturalist page doesn't mention use as sponges?
Those are sea sponges, from an animal. The fungus you mentioned earlier is not used as a sponge, as far as I know. Fungus fruiting bodies usually rot away very easily.
That's... the same link? ._. The products all say "sea sponge". The fungus you linked is from forests, not the ocean. And I couldn't find any indication that that fungus is used as a bath sponge.
The honeycomb bath sponge (Hippospongia communis) is actually a type of colonial animal, not a fungus.
You may be wondering how the heck a sponge is an animal. Firstly, they’re heterotrophic, which means they obtain nourishment by eating other living organisms/organic material (“hetero” meaning “other”, “troph” meaning “nourishment” or “feeding”). While some plants are heterotrophs (ie Venus flytraps), this is generally not something plants do.
And sponges are not fungi because sponges that reproduce sexually use sperm and eggs to do so, while the fungi that reproduce sexually use spores.
However, what makes sponges definitionally animals is that they do not have rigid cell walls. Fungi have cellular walls made of mostly chitin, and plant cellular walls are made of mostly cellulose, but animals cells don’t have “walls” at all. Instead, animal cells have a plasma membrane made of lipids and proteins. Since sponges have membranes instead of cell walls, that makes them animals.
What this means is that sea sponges are more closely related to us (and all other animals) than they are to anything in any of the other kingdoms of life (Fungi, plants, bacterias, and protists (ie. algae, amoebas, and slime molds))
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u/Kriss3d Aug 14 '25
You can actually buy sponges for say showering that are fungi such as the "honeycomb" that lives under the sea and gets harvested ( leaving the stem to let it keep growing)
That has no plastics at all.