Forget little green men – life on Mars could be … a sponge

SIMPLE sponge-like creatures could be living in deposits of salty water beneath the surface of Mars, a new study suggests.

It calculated that there are large amounts of oxygen dissolved in the water, particularly at the north and south poles of the red planet, and this could support at the very least microbes and ‘in some cases also simple animals like sponges’.

Dr Vlada Stamenkovic, who conducted the study with colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US, said: ‘Due to the scarcity of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations to support aerobic respiration.’ But they found that ‘in principle Mars could offer a wide range of near-surface environments with enough dissolved O2 for aerobic respiration’.

These ‘oases’ could support ‘complex multicellular organisms such as sponges’.

Sponges live by maintaining a constant flow of water through their bodies to absorb oxygen and remove waste.

Dr Stamenkovic said the research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, could not show whether there is life on Mars, only that there could be enough oxygen to support it.