Bobbing for Sponges

Animals that swim or slither their way through Florida's semitropical waters have a vaunted place in state folklore. Several have been chosen as team mascots -- the Miami Dolphins, Florida Marlins, and the University of Florida Gators, to name a few -- a sign of the influence these animals have had on the state. But no aquatic creature has had a greater effect on the Tampa Bay area than the sponge.

Unlike the reputedly intelligent dolphin, the sponge is no genius. It's hard to be smart when you consist of only one cell. The sponge that divers retrieve from the seabed, or perhaps the one you reach for in the shower, is actually a colony of millions of the one-cell organisms bound together in an organic matrix that makes up a soft, flexible lump.

As you learn if you check out Tarpon Springs' aging and modest Spongeorama, sponge diving predates the birth of Christ, and the first Greek sponge seekers actually worshipped the god Poseidon. For the past millennium or so, most spongers have been devoutly Greek Orthodox, and today many sponge boats carry a small shrine to St. Nicholas, the patron saint of mariners. The divers' deep devotion to their religion -- and to Greek culture -- resulted in the development of Tampa Bay's own little Greek village.

Sponge gathering actually began in the Florida Keys circa 1850, but it gained momentum around Tampa Bay after 1905, when George Cocoris brought to Florida the first mechanical diving apparatus, complete with a brass-helmeted diving suit and pump system, that enabled divers to stay in 75 to 100 feet of water for two hours at a time. Cocoris and those who worked with him soon discovered a particularly marketable type of sponge: the Rock Island wool sponge, so named because it resembles fine wool and is found in abundance around Rock Island, off Florida's west coast. When word of Cocoris's success got back to Greece, more sponge-diving families headed west, and within a decade or so, several thousand of his fellow Greeks had settled around Tarpon Springs to share in its prosperity.

By the 1930s, Tarpon Springs was the largest U.S. sponging port, but in the late '40s and early '50s a sponge blight and the growing popularity of synthetic sponges nearly wiped out the local industry. Still, the hardy Greeks held on. They discovered that tourists were drawn more by the town's Hellenic culture than by the sponges sold in the dockside markets. In the ensuing 40 years Tarpon Springs' waterfront area has been turned into a delightful tourist district filled with Greek restaurants, Greek pastry shops, and Greek art galleries. And should you choose to see divers pull sponges from the seabed, you can book passage on one of the glass-bottom boats that leave hourly from the town docks.

And so the town owes its success to the humble sponge. But even though you'll find bronze statues of sponge divers, with the exception of Spongeorama there is no tribute to the monocellular creature itself. Perhaps a future Florida sports team will choose the "Fightin' Sponges" as its mascot.