Sea Sponge Is a Master at Growing Glass Fiber, Researchers Say
Posted on: Wednesday, 20 August 2003, 06:00 CDT
Aug. 21--It's not often a sponge takes center stage.
Meet Euplectella, a tropical, deep sea sponge whose previous claim to fame was providing a home for mating shrimp.
Researchers at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in Murray Hill (NJ) say this lowly ocean creature may teach us a thing or two about telecommunications and about fiber-optic cables in particular.
According to the Bell Labs researchers, the Euplectella -- also known to divers and sponge aficionados as the Venus flower basket -- grows a network of glass fibers similar to, and perhaps more advanced than, the optical fiber found in today's state-of-the-art telecommunications networks.
In fact, the sponge's fiber may possess certain technological advantages over current industrial optical fiber, the scientists report in today's issue of the journal Nature.
For those of you who may be curious, sponges are animals, although not too far removed from single-celled microbes on the evolutionary scale. The sponge, for example, has no nervous system or muscles, according to marine biologists.
But they do build stuff, and Euplectella is very good at building glass fibers.
At the base of the sponge's skeleton is a bundle of fibers, each between 2 and 7 inches long and about the thickness of a human hair, which extends outward like an inverted crown.
The Bell Labs researchers found that when the biological fibers of the sponge were illuminated with light in experiments first conducted in October, they conducted light in the same way as fibers used in networks that send data and voice using lightwaves.
"We were very surprised," said Joanna Aizenberg, the Bell Labs materials scientist who led the research team.
Aizenberg, who has studied everything from starfish to tree leaves to learn how to apply nature's engineering principles to man-made materials, said she was first attracted to the Euplectella for its beauty and the intriguingly strong cage it makes out of glass.
They soon found the sponge's fibers have several advantages over man-made fiber, including flexibility.
"These bio-optical fibers are extremely tough," Aizenberg said. "You could tie them in tight knots and they would still not crack, unlike commercial fiber." One of the main causes for outages in commercial fiber networks is fractures that are costly to repair.
Also, the sponge makes its fibers at a low temperature, instead of the high-heat and expensive equipment needed for the man-made kind.
The researchers say commercial applications are years away, but the knowledge gained from studying nature could one day have a big impact on the telecommunications industry.
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(c) 2003, The Record, Hackensack, N.J. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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