“It’s the most successful animal that I know of, because it’s so old, and it’s everywhere,” said Jasper de Goeij, a marine ecologist at the University of Amsterdam.

“A sponge is basically an animal that has a lot of little mouths and one, or several, larger outflow openings,” said Dr.

de Goeij and colleagues have found that sponges appear to sneeze as a form of self-cleaning, releasing waste particles in mucus through their ostia.

The researchers came across sponges sneezing snot while working on a project investigating the role played by sponges in moving nutrients through a reef ecosystem.

The work required Niklas Kornder, another marine ecologist at Amsterdam, to spend a lot of time with sponges.

To figure out what those “stringy things” could be, the researchers recorded time-lapse footage of sponges, specifically the Caribbean tube sponge Aplysina archeri.

When first reviewing the time-lapse footage, Yuki Esser — a bioinformatics graduate student at Amsterdam at the time and a study co-author — was disappointed, thinking that the movement she was seeing (i.e., the sneeze) was just a camera focusing error.

archeri off the coast of Curaçao, recording footage “became kind of a sport,” she said?

“But how does a sponge know that this is the moment to sneeze?”