Anse Caritan

Sponges, the animals everyone takes for plants

Town : Sainte-Anne

Anse Caritan is a small beach in Sainte-Anne, at the southern tip of Martinique, where the water is unusually calm. It is also the start of the Trace des Caps, the path that follows the peninsula from beach to beach.

A sponge is an animal

It is the least intuitive thing on the reef. Those fixed, colourful, motionless shapes that look like plants or pottery are animals. With no mouth, no organs, and no movement at all.

A sponge lives by filtering water. It draws it in through thousands of tiny pores spread across its whole surface, takes out what is edible, and pushes it back out through the large openings you can see from a distance. That is all it does, all its life.

The giant barrel sponge, and its age

It is the largest sponge in the Caribbean and one of the largest in the world: up to two metres tall, and one to two metres across. Its open-barrel shape gave it its name.

And then there is its age. Some specimens in the region have been estimated at more than two thousand three hundred years old. An adult barrel sponge was already here before anyone thought of diving, and will in all likelihood be here after us.

What you do not do

You do not lean on it, you do not put a hand inside, you do not use it as a handhold to steady yourself. A broken sponge does not repair itself on the scale of a human life, and on the big ones, not on the scale of several.

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