The phylum Porifera is not a widely known group of animals. Although the skeleton of certain species, the bath sponges, is a common object, most people have no idea that it represents the collagenous skeleton of an animal. Even for Biologists, the sponges are poorly documented and their collagen remains one of the most puzzling in the animal kingdom. However, there is now an increasing interest in the biology of these primitive and fascinating multicellular animals and several recent books are available (Bergquist, 1978;Brien et al., 1973;Garrone, 1978; Simpson, 1984).
WHAT THE SPONGES ARE, WHAT THEY ARE NOT
General featuresThe animal nature of sponges was firmly established in the early nineteenth century and they are now considered as one of the most primitive multicellular animals, the first metazoans. The phylum Porifera, relatively small, comprises less than 6000 species, all being aquatic. Sponges have colonized all the seas and, for freshwater species, lakes and streams. They show a great diversity in colours, size (from a few millimeters to more than a meter) and shape. According to the species, they can be erect and form cups, fans, trees or finger-like structures; they can spread over the substratum or grow in a globular fashion. They are sedentary, filterfeeding animals and they reproduce by sexual mechanisms or asexual processes involving in certain cases special structures, the gemmules (see Simpson et al., this volume) or even by regeneration. They possess an apparent simplicity in their cellular structures (Simpson, 1984) which makes them a very suitable system for experimental studies, particularly in the field of cell recognition.