EXPLORING THE WORLD: SPONGES IN TARPON SPRINGS!

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Dade City, Florida (Travelers Rest Resort)

79 F, sunny

Another beautiful day! TK and I decided to take a ride to Tarpon Springs, about an hour away from TRR. This was our 4^th visit—we enjoyed taking Randy, Coleen, and B2 there a few years ago when we were in Disney World. Tarpon Springs has the highest percentage of Greek Americans of any city in the U.S. mostly because Greek immigrants arrived to work in the sponge industry here in the early late 1890s.

I decided that I wanted to purchase deep water yellow sponges harvested here in Tarpon Springs to share with my writing group—What are sponges? According to http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/porifera/poriferalh.html, sponges come in an incredible variety of colors and an amazing array of shapes. They are predominantly marine and can be found at all latitudes beneath the world's oceans, and from the intertidal to the deep-sea. Generally, they are stationary, though it has been shown that some are able to move slowly (up to 4 mm per day).

The person working in the shop told me that sponges are animals and they lay eggs. The sponge population in the Tarpon Springs area is healthy and there are more sponges now than when harvesting began over 100 years ago. But, the youngest sponge diver is about 45 years old, and there is only one sponge company in the area now.

This web site http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/sg095 had the most interesting sponge facts:

· Bath sponges may be the first non-edible product harvested from the sea.

· One of the first drugs for successfully treating cancer, cytosine arabinoside, was isolated from a Caribbean sponge, Cryptotheca cripta.

· It is thought that some sponges live for a very long time, perhaps over 100 years.

· Sponges are remarkable pumping "machines." In general, considering the different types of sponges there are, sponges can pump 10,000 times their own size (volume) in water in one day. A sponge the size of a gallon milk container could pump enough water to fill a residential small size swimming pool within one day.

· Recent Sea Grant research has shown that shallow-water sponge populations in the Keys are much more dynamic than previously thought to be.

· On average there are approximately 13 sponges to the pound.

· Because of their sessile nature, biologists once considered sponges to be plants. However, sponges are indeed a part of the animal kingdom, but they are very much different than the types of animals that are familiar to most people. Actually, in many ways, sponges can be considered to be a colony of single-celled organisms that work together in a coordinated fashion to survive.

Okay, I got a little carried away with sponges, but this is the first time I decided to really take a good look at what they really were! I thought it was interesting that unlike manmade sponges, these sponges do not harbor bacteria.

The little shops in this small village are very attractive and inviting. TK is the most patient husband ever. He lets me wander in and out of shops to my heart’s content, thank goodness. I especially liked a spice shop, the boutiques, the rock shop (same person I saw yesterday at Webster Flea Market with mounted bats, lizards, and bugs, he helped me add to my brother’s collection), all the sponge shops, and a jewelry shop where all the jewelry was made of carved vegetable ivory — I know about this South American tagua nut because buttons were made of this material before plastic in the 1880s.

Finally, and most important of all, we had lunch at Hellas Greek Restaurant and Bakery—our very favorite Greek restaurant!! We started with an appetizer, Saganaki, which is a strong sort of mozzarella cheese served flaming. Fabulous! We both chose Pastitsio as our entrée, a ziti macaroni layered with ground beef and a tomato sauce and topped with the creamiest of cheese flavored with a smidge of nutmeg—a Greek version of lasagna and my favorite Greek dish, accompanied by sweet peas in a tomato sauce and rice. We decided to take our Baklava and Kataifa (looks like shredded wheat) home to share…hahaha.