Have links to the research behind this? I'm very interested. That being said, my systems have tons of sponge life of all kinds everywhere, and still quite obviously need water changes. Allelopathy is a thing! (And I use Carbon and Ozone also)
Above link is marine science lesson plan that explains how sponges process food.
The recognition that all macroorganisms live in symbiotic association with microbial communities has opened up a new field in biology. Animals, plants, and algae are now considered holobionts, complex ecosystems consisting of the host, the microbiota, and the interactions among them...
microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com
The sponge loop
The assimilation of dissolved organic matter (DOM) by sponge holobionts facilitates DOM cycling in benthic habitats with cascading effects on marine food webs [
29]. Microbes contribute to the assimilation of DOM by the sponge holobiont [
29,
114,
115], which can account for up to ~ 90% of the holobiont’s total heterotrophic carbon uptake [
116,
117,
118,
119,
120,
121,
122]. In addition to providing an important food source for the holobiont, DOM uptake by sponges has been proposed to play a key role in DOM cycling within tropical and deep-sea coral reefs via a pathway termed the “sponge loop” [
29,
114]. By rapidly taking up the DOM released by primary producers and converting it into particulate organic matter (POM) in the form of detritus, sponges transform DOM into a food source that is more readily available to other benthic reef fauna [
29,
115,
123,
124] (Fig.
2). Similar to the microbial loop [
1,
125], the sponge loop therefore enables the energy and nutrients in DOM to be retained and recycled within reef food webs. Although exact quantification of DOM cycling by the sponge loop is lacking, DOM uptake by cryptic sponges in the Caribbean and Indo-Pacific is estimated to be on the same order of magnitude as gross reef primary productivity and may even exceed DOM cycling by the microbial loop [
29,
126]. Thus, by acting through the sponge loop, the sponge microbiome may play an important role in driving DOM cycling at the ecosystem level, as well as facilitating energy transfer through reef food webs (Fig.
2).
