Just Bath Sponge Thoughts

My parents have a sea sponge in their guest bath, and I tried it out when I was there. I was looking at the shapes of it and remembering that sea sponges are animals, not plants. This thought percolated until I suddenly, in the car, asked if anyone knew whether the sea sponge that we use in the bath is the corpse or the skeleton of the animal in question. Nobody knew, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.

Initially I read just the introduction, and since it says that a sponge body consists of "jelly-like mesohyl sandwiched between two thin layers of cells", I thought the answer must be "corpses" (i.e. the remnants of the outer layers of cells rather than of the mesohyl). However, on further investigation it turned out that it's actually the skeleton, bath sponges being distinguished by being the rare varieties that form their skeletons of flexible spongin (a collagen protein) instead of something rigid like silica or calcium.

Since I liked the feeling of the sea sponge, I bought one when I came home, and now every time I shower I meditate on the note of macabre introduced by washing yourself with the corpse skeleton (it's equally macabre though) of an animal. (Though a bath sponge that you buy is actually a piece cut off of a larger one, so it's more like a piece of bone I suppose.) (Then again, though, sponges are like plants in that if you cut them up all of the pieces develop into new sponges, so if it had been left alive the piece would have counted as a whole organism, I suppose?) (These philosophical questions are amusing, but don't really affect the level of macabre.)

Then yesterday it suddenly occurred to me that the sponge is the only animal in our flat without a name - at least, not counting microscopic pests, insects, and food. In fact, several of our potted plants have names, which seems unfair because sponges are much more closely related to us than plants are. "Bozo" and "Felicia" immediately occurred as possibilities, for some reason, but neither seemed to fit.